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  • Corporations Donated $164,000 to Anti-Voting Rights Senators Despite Pledges

    Rep. Terri Sewell holds a photo of the late Rep. John Lewis at a press event outside of the U.S. Capitol on August 24, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Despite pledging that they would fight to protect voting rights, major corporations like Amazon and Facebook have given $164,000 to Senate Republicans in 2021 so far — even though the party has made it a major priority to block voting rights advancement.

    According to a report by the government watchdog Accountable.US, eight major corporations have donated to Senate Republicans, giving tens of thousands of dollars over the course of this year. In July, those same corporations signed a letter pledging to support expanding election access, specifically citing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act that Senate Republicans shot down last week.

    For months, Republicans have vocally opposed the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, disingenuously claiming that the expansions to the Voting Rights Act, which are aimed at reducing voter suppression for historically disenfranchised groups, are a violation of states’ rights.

    The bill, which was passed by the House in August, would place restrictions on jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in elections, mandating that they gain approval from the Justice Department if they want to change their election rules.The Senate’s rejection of the bill comes in a contentious year for voting rights, as Republicans across the country have been introducing and passing laws to make it harder to vote as an extreme reaction to the 2020 election.

    The letter, which is dated July 14 and signed by hundreds of businesses, claims to stand against those efforts. “[T]he undersigned group of U.S. employers urges Congress to address these problems through legislation amending the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” the letter reads. “Last Congress, the House of Representatives passed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. We support the ongoing work of both the House and the Senate to enact legislation amending the Voting Rights Act this Congress.”

    By donating to Republicans who oppose strengthening voting access, corporations directly undermine the letter’s claims. Target, which signed the letter, has donated $32,000 to Senate Republicans; Dell, also a signatory, has donated $38,500. Meanwhile, Amazon and Facebook both donated over $20,000, and Microsoft and Boston Scientific have donated more than $15,000 each.

    The report found that the most common recipient of donations was Sen. John Thune (R-South Dakota), minority whip for the GOP. Thune received thousands of dollars in donations from Boston Scientific, Dell, Target, Intel, Amazon and Microsoft. It’s unclear what the donations are for, since federal filing guidelines don’t require such information to be divulged, but empowering the prominent Republican stands directly against the companies’ stated goals.

    Thune has consistently fallen in step with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and his opposition to the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Earlier this year, the South Dakota lawmaker delivered a speech claiming that the Democrats’ marquee voting rights bill, then known as the For the People Act or H.R. 1, was a “power-grab” by Democrats. In reality, the bill would massively expand voting access, with the goal of driving out dark money’s influence in politics and making it easier for everyone to cast a ballot.

    Though Republicans have come up with a myriad of excuses for their opposition to voting rights advancement, some lawmakers have made the motivation behind the nationwide push for voter suppression explicitly clear: the party wants less people to vote. Even a so-called compromise bill from right-wing Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin (West Virginia) failed to garner any Republican support; lawmakers have still yet to find any compromise that would please the party’s senators.

    This is not the first time corporations have broken pledges with regard to political donations. After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, 147 Republicans voted against the certification of the election results, and many companies made pledges to stop donating to those Republicans or stop political donations altogether. But so far, four dozen companies that pledged to suspend donations have broken those promises, including major corporations like Facebook and Target, according to Popular Information.

    While making pledges and signing letters is an easy way to receive positive press or praise from the public, companies are ultimately looking out for their bottom line — and as long as Republicans oppose measures like raising corporate income taxes, the GOP and corporations will maintain a mutually beneficial relationship at the cost of the public.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump Threatened to Leave GOP Until They Reminded Him They Funded His Lawsuits

    President Donald Trump waves as he departs on the South Lawn of the White House, on December 12, 2020, in Washington, D.C.

    Former President Donald Trump threatened the head of the Republican National Committee (RNC) with his departure from the party after some of its members refused to back his false claims of fraud in the 2020 election, a new book reports.

    A book written by ABC News’s Jonathan Karl, titled “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show,” details the last days of the Trump administration, including Trump’s conversation with RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, which took place on January 20 during his final Air Force One flight as president.

    McDaniel had called to wish Trump a farewell from office. But Trump was “in no mood for small talk or nostalgic goodbyes,” Karl wrote. Instead, Trump “got right to the point. He told her he was leaving the Republican Party and would be creating his own political party.”

    Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son, was also on the call with McDaniel, Karl said in his book:

    The younger Trump had been relentlessly denigrating the RNC for being insufficiently loyal to Trump. In fact, at the January 6 rally before the Capitol Riot, the younger Trump all but declared that the old Republican Party didn’t exist anymore.

    Trump explained he was leaving the party because not enough Republicans were willing to agree with his claims that his loss to now-President Joe Biden was due to election fraud.

    “You cannot do that. If you do, we will lose forever,” McDaniel reportedly said to him in response.

    “Exactly. You lose forever without me,” Trump retorted. “I don’t care.”

    In the days following Trump’s conversation with McDaniel, RNC leadership reminded him that he still depended on them for a number of resources.

    The RNC noted that they would be an enormous asset to his potential election run in 2024 and threatened not to pay legal fees relating to Trump’s election challenges if he left the party. They also said they would withhold data from him, including tens of millions of email addresses.

    Five days after his talk with McDaniel, Trump reversed course and said he’d stick with the GOP after all, Karl’s book details.

    A Trump departure from the GOP could have been cataclysmic. A Quinnipiac University poll conducted in October showcased that the former president still enjoys significant support from Republican-leaning voters.

    When asked if Trump should run for the presidency again in 2024, 78 percent of GOP voters said they wanted him to do so, versus just 16 percent who said no.

    But when the question was posed to all voters participating in the poll, not just Republican-leaning ones, the general consensus was that voters didn’t want Trump to run again. Just 35 percent of all respondents said they’d like him to run for president in 2024, while nearly 6 in 10 respondents, or 58 percent, said they didn’t want him to.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • GOP Moans Over Delay on $778B for Defense While Denouncing “Tax-and-Spend” Bill

    Ranking member Sen. Jim Inhofe speaks with an aide during a news conference with Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Afghanistan in the U.S. Capitol on September 14, 2021.

    While Democrats debate their Build Back Better Act that could materially improve the lives of millions of Americans, Republicans are complaining that the reconciliation bill is taking priority over what they think federal money should be used for: a bloated defense spending bill that funds an agency that has never passed an audit.

    The National Defense Authorization Act is slated to cost a whopping $778 billion, five percent higher than the amount that was appropriated for defense for this fiscal year. This is a massive amount of spending that would — if held at this level over 10 years — amount to nearly 4.5 times the amount that the $1.75 trillion reconciliation bill would cost in the same amount of time. Of course, defense spending is rarely held static, and usually grows year by year.

    Though the defense spending bill has been put on the back burner while Democrats continue to negotiate the reconciliation bill, there are still four weeks left on the congressional calendar and the bill will almost certainly pass on a bipartisan basis as it always does, save for some progressive objections. But even though there is no reason for the bill to be voted on immediately, that hasn’t stopped Senate Republicans from complaining about it being delayed.

    In a Republican press conference on Tuesday, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), a Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member, said that “there’s not an answer” as to why the defense bill isn’t getting time on the Senate floor now. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) called the annual defense bill “one of the most significant pieces of legislation that we will consider this Congress.” Wicker is partially correct; the price tag of the bill is, indeed, significant. But, as progressives have pointed out, spending on defense itself is not vital and takes away from far more urgent priorities.

    The fact that the GOP used this minor delay to justify calling a press conference of 13 Republican senators reveals that the party is desperately clinging to controversy while Democrats debate the reconciliation bill; Inhofe went on to call the conference a “major message” to Schumer.

    In reality, lawmakers’ opposition to the bloated defense spending bill is negligible, coming only from a few progressive lawmakers. The Department of Defense is in no danger of running out of funds, especially considering that the country is supposedly no longer engaged in a war in Afghanistan for the first year in 20 years.

    Instead of engaging in any critical thought or analysis as to why the defense budget is so unbelievably high, North Dakota Sen. John Thune (R) criticized Democrats for their proposals to bolster social programs and tackle the climate crisis — measures that have the potential to transform millions of Americans’ lives.

    Democrats “have been so preoccupied with passing their reckless tax-and-spending spree that they have overlooked and ignored some of the basic responsibilities of governing,” said Thune. It’s ironic that Thune would complain about spending in this context — first, because of how much larger the defense budget is than the Build Back Better Act’s spending portion. The $1.75 trillion over 10 years for social programs, which is entirely offset by tax proposals, is just a small fraction of the $9.1 trillion that Congress has approved for defense over the past 10 years, adjusted for inflation.

    Second, the comparison is nearly completely meaningless when it comes to what the federal dollars would do. While the reconciliation bill could go toward provisions like lowering sky-high drug prices in the U.S. and taking small steps toward addressing the climate crisis, huge portions of the defense budget go straight to private defense contractors, whose CEOs pocket millions in profits each year.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Dems Walk Out as North Carolina GOP Picks Jan. 6 Participant to Fill Vacant Seat

    Trump supporters occupy the West Front of the Capitol and the inauguration stands on January 6, 2021.

    Dozens of Democratic lawmakers in North Carolina’s state House of Representatives walked off the chamber floor in protest Monday night after Republicans seated Donnie Loftis, who has admitted to participating in the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol building.

    Loftis, a Trump loyalist and 30-year combat veteran who now represents Gaston as a member of the state House, was nominated by county representatives to fill a vacancy that occurred due to a death of the previous lawmaker from that area. Earlier this year, Loftis resigned from chairing a board of directors for a local health care system after his social media posts describing business closures due to COVID-19 as “tyranny” became public knowledge.

    Loftis has admitted that he was at the Capitol on the day of the attack, which was perpetrated by a mob of loyalists to former President Donald Trump — even stating in social media posts he has since deleted that it was his duty to be there that day. Of course, the continued claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election made by Trump and his followers are completely baseless.

    Loftis has since claimed that he didn’t take part in any violent actions that day, saying he was merely “at the entrance” of the building “when they breached the door.” The Republican lawmaker also said he was gassed three times during the January 6 attack.

    In October, Republicans in the legislature said they would approve Loftis’s appointment to the vacancy, with House Speaker Tim Moore (R) justifying this decision by claiming that the FBI never pursued Loftis for his involvement in the attack. State law does not require a new election to fill the position.

    Rather than participate in the vote, which Republicans could do on their own due to having a majority in the chamber, more than 40 Democrats walked off the House floor in protest, leaving just six of their members in the room for the vote.

    Democratic Party Chairwoman Bobbie Richardson condemned Republicans for appointing Loftis to the position.

    “Today marks a new low for General Assembly Republicans because, instead of condemning those actions and rejecting the rhetoric that incites violence, they are welcoming a Capitol insurrection participant with open arms,” Richardson said in a statement. “The Republican Party hand-picked Loftis to join their ranks, further demonstrating how trending towards extremism is the future of the North Carolina Republican Party.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Nearly a Third of Republicans Surveyed Are Ready to Support Violence

    A man calls on people to raid the building as Trump supporters clash with police and security forces as they try to storm the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021.

    New public opinion research from the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute, part of its 12th annual American Values Survey, has returned alarming findings.

    Close to one-third of Republicans in the survey, or 30%, agreed with the statement that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” That was more than the combined total of Democrats and independents who say the same thing (at 11% and 17%, respectively).

    PRRI CEO and founder Robert Jones said the large proportion of Republicans who appear ready to endorse political violence is “a direct result of former President Trump calling into question the election.” Jones noted that according to the same survey, more than two-thirds of Republicans (68%) claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump, as opposed to only 26% of independents and 6% of Democrats.

    The study also found that 39% of those who believed that Trump had won the 2020 election endorsed potential violence, compared to only 10% of those who rejected election misinformation. There were also signs of a split based on media consumption, with 40% of Republicans who trust far-right news sources agreeing taht violence could be necessary, compared to 32% of those who trust Fox News and 22% among those who trust mainstream outlets. In addition, respondents who said violence may be necessary are more likely to report feeling like strangers in their country, to say American culture has mostly worsened since the 1950s and to believe that God has granted America a special role in human history.

    This study comes out just before Tuesday’s “off-off-year” 2021 elections, with the national media focused on the race for governor in the swing state of Virginia. Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin has floated baseless conspiracy theories about the election and allowed surrogates to perpetuate Trump’s Big Lie, while maintaining some distance from the most extreme claims. Youngkin has said the disgraced former president’s endorsement is an “honor” and Trump has repeatedly urged his supporters to vote for Youngkin. The unexpectedly close race between Youngkin and Democrat Terry McAuliffe in a state that has largely trended Democratic since 2008 could provide an important symbolic victory for Republicans.

    The PRRI survey is not the first indicator that the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 may represents a trend rather than an anomaly. Ashli Babbitt, a Jan. 6 rioter killed by a Capitol police officer while attempting to force her way into a secure area, has been turned into a martyr by both Trump and many of his followers. At a recent rally in Virginia, Republicans pledged allegiance to a flag that was supposedly at the Capitol during that riot, and speakers called for Trump supporters to “monitor” election workers and officials. One Virginia election official recently described how Republican poll watchers in his state have acted with “a level of energy and sometimes aggression” and said he had received “very personal attacking, trolling emails accusing me, pre-election, of fraud and even making specific allegations of what the fraud would be.”

    Indeed, the idea that hypothetical voter fraud could justify violence is, in itself, something new on the American political scene. There have been accusations of fraudulent elections throughout American history — some valid, some bogus — but Trump and his supporters are alone in suggesting violence. (Of course, there was one other presidential election that led to violence: The election of 1860, which sparked the Civil War.) Trump’s team lost virtually all the dozens of court cases filed over the 2020 election, and their attempt to get the results overturned was unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court. Even former Attorney General Bill Barr and many key Republican legislators rejected Trump’s claims of fraud, meaning that anyone who insists Trump was the real winner presumably thinks that the nefarious conspiracy included dozens of high-ranking Republicans.

    Jones, the PRRI CEO, did not mention that additional context, but perhaps did not have to. He described the results of the group’s new survey “an alarming finding,” adding: “I’ve been doing this a while, for decades, and it’s not the kind of finding that as a sociologist, a public opinion pollster, that you’re used to seeing.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Chomsky: Build Back Better Fiasco Exposes How Both Parties Serve Corporate Power

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reacts after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer walks in front of him to speak at a weekly news conference on August 3, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    The United States is an abysmal outlier among its economic peers when it comes to social protection programs. Consider, for example, paid parental leave. According to a survey of the parental leave systems of 41 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Union, the U.S. was the only country that does not mandate a single week of paid parental leave. It also has an infrastructure bordering on the verge of collapse, including crumbling roads and bridges, water and energy systems.

    For specific historical and political reasons, the U.S. never developed a European-style social welfare state. However, since the election of President Joe Biden, and thanks to pressures from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, bills have been introduced to fill some glaring gaps. The Build Back Better budget reconciliation bill, in particular, focuses on a long list of social programs that would help close the U.S.’s gap with its liberal-democratic peers when it comes to social protection programs. It would also help fight the climate crisis. But so-called moderate Democrats (actually right-wingers) in Congress have been opponents of such progressive policies from day one and threaten to derail the best opportunity available to transform federal priorities and move U.S. society away from its traditional dog-eat-world mentality.

    In the interview that follows, world-renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky assesses the ongoing drama in Congress over President Biden’s spending bills and the political ramifications of the Democrats failing to carry out sweeping social and climate reforms.

    C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, more than two decades after the “end [of] welfare as we know it,” Democrats have the chance to reshape the country’s safety net and close the gap with the U.S.’s liberal-democratic peers on social protection programs, as well as fight the climate crisis. However, in perhaps a rather unsurprising development, it looks like the obstructionist elements inside the Democratic Party will make sure that the U.S. remains a noticeable outlier among developed countries by not having a major social welfare state. Indeed, Joe Manchin, one of the Democratic senators standing in the way of the passage of the reconciliation bill, said that the U.S. should not turn into an “entitlement society.” How do you assess all the drama in Congress around the $4 trillion in infrastructure, social programs and combatting the climate crisis, and what does this whole experience reveal to us about the state of U.S. politics in the post-Trump era?

    Noam Chomsky: It’s not post-Trump, unfortunately. Former President Donald Trump’s heavy hand has not been lifted. He owns the increasingly radicalized voting base of the Republican Party. The leadership slinks to his Mar-a-Lago palace to plead for his blessing, and the few who dare to raise their heads have them lopped off quickly.

    The right-wing Democrats (mislabeled “moderate”) follow along for their own reasons. These are not hard to discern in some cases: It’s not a great surprise that a coal baron who is Congress’s leading recipient of fossil fuel funding (Manchin) should proclaim the fossil fuel industry’s “no elimination” slogan, or that a top recipient of donations from the pharmaceutical industry (Sen. Kyrsten Sinema) should be holding back badly need drug pricing reforms. That’s normal in a political system mired in corruption.

    But the rot runs deeper.

    It’s often been observed that the U.S. has a one-party political system — the business party — with two factions, Democrats and Republicans. In the past, the Republican faction has tended to be more dedicated to the concerns of extreme wealth and the corporate sector, but with the resurgence of the one-sided class war called “neoliberalism” under President Ronald Reagan, the leadership has been going off the rails. By now they barely resemble a political party in a functioning democracy.

    Since the late President Jimmy Carter years, the Democrats have not lagged far behind, becoming a party of affluent professionals and Wall Street donors with the working class handed over to their bitter class enemy.

    One of Trump’s occasional true statements was that Republicans could never win a fair election on their actual programs. Recognizing this, since President Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy, the party has been mobilizing voters on “cultural issues” — white supremacy, abortion, guns, traditional patriarchal families, God (favoring the evangelical Christian variety)… anything that doesn’t lift the veil on their loyal service to their prime constituency. That way they can at least stay in the running, exploiting the deeply undemocratic features of the electoral system with its built-in advantages for their largely rural voting base.

    All this and much more has been extensively discussed elsewhere. We need not elaborate here. It’s playing out in the halls of Congress right now. The extent to which the U.S. is an “outlier” glares at us wherever we look, sometimes in ways that verge on obscenity. Take paid maternity leave. In the U.S.: none. In the next largest country in the hemisphere, Brazil: about four months. That’s in addition to the universal health care, free higher education, and other public benefits that are found almost everywhere.

    To be fair, the richest country in the world, with unparalleled advantages, is not alone in denying paid leave to new mothers. (Fathers? Forget about it.) The U.S. is joined by the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea and Tonga.

    Recently a lead columnist for the London Financial Times quipped that if Sen. Bernie Sanders was in Germany, he could be running on the right-wing Christian Democrat ticket. Not just a witticism, and not a comment on Sanders. Rather, on the socioeconomic system that has been created in the one-party state, dramatically so in the era of vicious class war since Reagan.

    It was not always thus. In the 1930s, while continental Europe succumbed to fascism, the U.S. forged a path toward social democracy on a wave of militant labor activism, lively and diverse politics, and a sympathetic administration. Years earlier, the U.S. had pioneered mass public education, a major contribution to democracy and social justice; Europe lagged far behind.

    It’s beyond irony that now Europe is upholding a tattered social democracy while the U.S. declines to Trump-led proto-fascism, or that under Trump, the secretary of education sought to dismantle public education, carrying forward the neoliberal principles that underlie the sharp defunding of public education aimed at its elimination. All this is rooted in the “libertarian” doctrines of Milton Friedman, James Buchanan and other leading figures of the movement, closely linked from its origins to the attack against government “overreach” by desegregating schools.

    It’s worth recalling that these doctrines had their origin in bitter class war in interwar Austria, as we’ve discussed before. They are well-suited for its resumption in the neoliberal era.

    The Biden effort to move the U.S. somewhat toward the humane norms of other OECD countries is still not dead, but it has been virtually neutralized in Congress. The Republican organization is rock-solid opposed. Its red lines include preservation in full of their one legislative achievement under Trump, “the U.S. Donor Relief Act of 2017,” as Joseph Stiglitz termed the wholesale robbery, which punched a huge hole in the deficit (for a “good” cause, so OK). By charming coincidence this near-$2 trillion gift to the very rich and the corporate sector is about the same as the measly remnants of the Biden reconciliation bill (spread over 10 years) that have barely survived the right-wing assault.

    This time the “deficit threat” is definitely not OK, as is loudly proclaimed. Not a good cause this time. Wrong recipients: the poor, workers, mothers and other “unpeople.”

    Should the progressives remain opposed to the infrastructure bill if Congress refuses to pass the social safety net bill in its original version?

    It’s question of tactics, not principle. That’s not to say that it’s unimportant. Choice of tactics can have very far-reaching consequences. Rather, it means that it’s not easy to answer. There are many imponderables, not least, how it will affect the coming elections. In earlier years, it was often not too important which faction of the business party took power. In recent years, it has been. Proto-fascism is on the march. Worse still, as we’ve discussed elsewhere, we’re are advancing to a precipice from which there will be no return. Four more years of Trumpism might well tip the balance.

    Which answer to the question you raise will reduce the likelihood of impending disasters? I don’t see an easy answer. The question may by now be moot, with the vicious cuts in the reconciliation bill.

    Won’t there be grave political consequences if Democrats blow the chance to reshape federal priorities? After all, the majority of U.S. people seem to be in support of Biden’s Build Back Better Act.

    The Republicans have been pursuing a careful and well-thought-out policy of maintaining power as a minority party dedicated to great wealth and corporate power. It has been openly announced by the most malicious and politically powerful of the gang: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, repeating what worked well for his reactionary cause during the President Barack Obama years (helped by Obama’s quick betrayal of those who believed the pretty rhetoric about “hope and change”).

    So far, it’s working. If it does work, with Trump and acolytes returning to power thanks to this malevolence, we will be well on our way to proto-fascism and to falling off the precipice. Failure of Biden’s efforts to reshape federal priorities will have a terrible human cost. Beyond that, it will also provide a weapon for the McConnell strategy of harming the country as much as possible and blaming the outcome on the Democrats.

    Brutal, but not stupid.

    Is there a way to fend off these grave political consequences? Not within the confines of the deeply corrupt and undemocratic political system. The only way that has ever worked, and can work now, is mass popular pressure — what the powerful call “the peasants coming with their pitchforks.”

    Trump has been out of office for several months, yet his influence among Republican voters remains unwavering. What continues to drive the pro-Trump crowd?

    We’ve often discussed it before, and there has been extensive investigation by social scientists — most convincingly, in my opinion, by Tony DiMaggio.

    It’s not just Trump, though he has shown real genius in tapping poisons that run deep in U.S. history and contemporary culture, and in portraying himself as “your savior” — even “the chosen one” — while stabbing you in the back. That’s no small accomplishment for a person with few talents other than chicanery, fraud, and wielding the wrecking ball to destroy everything he can’t claim as his own.

    But it’s not just Trump. We can also ask why Nixon’s racist Southern strategy succeeded, or Reagan’s quite overt racism — in his case, apparently sincerely held. We can ask why the abortion and gun frauds took hold, or why in the face of overwhelming evidence, segments of the left join the far right in anti-vax campaigns, at enormous human costs, or why “more than half of President Trump’s supporters [in 2020] embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory of a global satanic pedophile ring that was plotting against the 45th president of the United States,” who was valiantly trying to save the children from such “prominent pedophiles” as Biden, Hillary Clinton, and other “Deep State” suspects.

    The signs of collapse of the social order are too numerous and familiar to review once again. To a large extent, it can be attributed to the impact of the one-sided and vicious class war of the past 40-plus years. There are deeper cultural and historical roots. It’s not just the U.S. European racism and xenophobia is even more malevolent in some respects. One sign is the corpses in the Mediterranean, victims of the frenzy of Europe’s dedication to torture the survivors of its centuries of destruction of Africa.

    The effort to reveal the roots of such pathologies is no mere academic enterprise, and not just these. We can add the pathologies of the rich and powerful, including the deplorables who hurl the epithet at others. These have been far more consequential. Efforts to understand are of value primarily as a guide to self-reflection and to action to find remedies.

    And quickly. Our strange species doesn’t have a lot of time to spare.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Here’s How Conservatives Can Be Convinced to Blame Big Oil for Climate Change

    People take part in a protest against ExxonMobil before the start of its trial outside the New York State Supreme Court building on October 22, 2019, in New York, USA.

    What does it take to convince a Republican that oil and gas companies lied about the existence of climate change and are responsible for contributing to it?

    Some were swayed by just a few sentences.

    That’s according to a new poll commissioned by VICE News and the Guardian with Covering Climate Now, which shows that after learning that oil and gas companies became aware of climate change as early as 1977, even conservatives were more likely to blame them for climate change.

    Overall, Republicans are far less likely to “strongly agree” (14.9 percent) that “climate change is happening now” than Democrats (70.6 percent). Republicans are also far less likely to “strongly agree” (9.8 percent) that climate change has led to “increased heat waves, droughts, wildfires, storms, and other extreme weather events in recent years” than Democrats (66.5 percent).

    Republicans are also less likely than Democrats to hold corporations responsible for contributing to man-made climate change. For example, just 19.6 percent of Republicans polled said oil and gas companies were “completely responsible” for the climate crisis (while 60.2 percent of Democrats hold that view), and a majority say global warming was “caused by natural changes in the environment.”

    <i>VICE News/Guardian/Covering Climate Now</i>/YouGov Climate Crimes poll, October 7-13, 2021 - <a href="data:application/octet-stream;charset=utf-8,%EF%BB%BFX.1%2CTotal%2CDemocrat%2CRepublican%2CIndependent%0Acaused%20mostly%20by%20human%20activities%2C55%2C79.6%2C24.5%2C50%0Acaused%20mostly%20by%20natural%20changes%20in%20the%20environment%2C31.6%2C17.2%2C55.4%2C33%0Aother%2C5.1%2C2.3%2C6%2C6.3%0Anone%20of%20the%20above%20because%20global%20warming%20isn't%20happening%2C8.3%2C0.9%2C14.2%2C10.7">Get the Data</a> - Created with <a href="https://www.datawrapper.de/_/Uyzzx">Datawrapper</a>
    Source: VICE News/Guardian/Covering Climate Now/YouGov Climate Crimes poll, October 7-13, 2021 – Get the Data – Created with Datawrapper

    But that changes after they were informed of findings from a 2015 Inside Climate News investigation that showed the world’s largest oil and gas company has known for decades that the burning of fossil fuels caused man-made climate change but did not publicly acknowledge it:

    Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation—an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public.

    After being exposed to that information, participants across the political spectrum were more willing to believe that oil and gas companies knew about and contributed to climate change. This includes Republicans: While 27.8 percent of Republican respondents initially said that oil and gas companies were “completely” or “mostly” responsible for climate change, that number rose to 36.5 percent after they read the excerpt.

    Source: VICE News/Guardian/Covering Climate Now/YouGov Climate Crimes poll, October 7-13, 2021 - Created with Datawrapper
    Source: VICE News/Guardian/Covering Climate Now/YouGov Climate Crimes poll, October 7-13, 2021 – Created with Datawrapper

    And while 38.4 percent of Republicans said that oil and gas companies lied to suppress public awareness of climate change before reading the excerpt, afterwards, 48.6 percent said oil and gas companies had lied.

    At the same time, after learning about the Inside Climate News investigation, the number of Republicans who responded “climate change does not exist” actually rose slightly, from 14.7 percent to 18.0 percent.

    Overall, more than half of all surveyed believed after reading the excerpt that oil and gas companies lied about both their contribution to and knowledge of the existence of climate change, the poll found.

    The poll shows that even though Americans’ views of climate change are hardened by their politics, education levels, or their media consumption habits, they can be persuaded if they’re provided with compelling evidence.

    The poll surveyed 1,000 Americans over the age of 18 between Oct. 7 and Oct. 13. The survey results come as the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, kicks off in Glasgow next week.

    Though more people are becoming aware of climate change and its causes, the prospects for taking substantive action to protect the climate are dim.

    Congressional Democrats continue to hash out the details of a multi-trillion infrastructure plan, and already the centerpiece climate provision of that plan — the Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP), which would incentivize companies to transition to renewable energy — is likely to be cut due to opposition from West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, The New York Times reported last week.

    Manchin, who filmed an ad depicting him shooting a bullet through a Democratic cap-and-trade bill in 2010, has long been cozy with and supported by energy companies. He has received more than $64,000 from lobbyists, political action committees, and lobbying firms connected to Exxon over the past decade, Grist reported in July. Manchin also made nearly $500,000 in 2020 due to his non-public shares in West Virginia-based coal company Enersystems.

    This summer, Channel 4 in the U.K. published a recording showing a senior Exxon lobbyist bragging, “Joe Manchin, I talk to his office every week.” In September, when asked if he had weekly meetings with Exxon, Manchin responded, “Absolutely not.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Jim Crow Politics Have Descended on Education

    A man holds a sign reading "CRITICAL RACIST THEORY IS POISON" during a protest

    The United States is at war with itself, and education is one of its more recent casualties. The institutions crucial for creating informed, engaged and critical citizens are under siege. One consequence is that the language of democracy is disappearing along with the institutions and formative cultures that make it possible.

    The signs are everywhere. Jim Crow politics are back with a vengeance. Both during and in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, the Republican Party has dropped any pretense to democracy in its affirmation of authoritarian politics and its embrace of white supremacy. This has been evident in their weaponizing of identity, support for a range of discriminatory policies of exclusion, the construction of a wall that has become a resurgent symbol of nativism, and under the Trump regime the internment of children separated from their undocumented parents at the southern border.

    The rush to construct a home-grown form of authoritarianism is also clear in the passing of a barrage of voter suppression laws introduced in Republican-controlled state legislatures, all based on baseless claims of voter fraud. Voter suppression has become the new currency of a rebranded form of racialized fascist politics. As of September 1, 2021, 361 bills had been put into play in 47 states while 19 states have passed 33 laws that make it harder for Americans to vote, particularly poor Black people. Neoliberalism’s survival-of-the-fittest ideology has turned even more toxic. The right-wing appetite for maliciousness and cruelty now translates into a form of learned brutality—allowing people to think the unthinkable and embrace the tenets of white supremacy.

    Voter suppression laws fuel white supremacy and fit nicely into the racist argument that whites are under siege by people of color who are attempting to dethrone and replace them. In this case, such laws, along with ongoing attacks on equality and social justice, are defended by right-wing extremists as justifiable measures to protect whites from the “contaminating” influence of immigrants, Black people, and others considered unworthy of occupying and participating in the public sphere and democratic process. Similarly, voter suppression laws are defended as legitimate attempts to provide proof of “real Americans,” code for defining people of color as “counterfeit citizens.” In actuality, these laws are not only racist in intent, but are also meant to enable permanent minority rule for the Republican Party, the end point of which is a form of authoritarianism.

    The attacks on critical race theory are a barely disguised effort by white supremacist to define who counts as an American and has a long legacy in which those groups deemed unworthy of citizenship disappear. The language of historical and pedagogical erasure extends from the genocide inflicted on Native Americans to the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow and includes the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the second world war and the rise of the racialized carceral state. There is more at work here than the whitening of collective identity, the public sphere, and American history. There are invocations of whiteness, as Paul Gilroy suggests, that enhance “the allure of [a] rebranded fascism.”

    The Republican Party’s labeling of critical race theory as “ideological or faddish” both denies the history of racism as well as the ways in which it is enforced through policy, laws and institutions. For many Republicans, racial hatred takes on the ludicrous claim of protecting students from learning about the diverse ways in which racism persist in American society. For instance, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has stated that “There is no room in our classrooms for things like critical race theory. Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money.” DeSantis has not only labeled critical race theory as “false history,” but he has also extended the discourse of his virulent attack on any vestige of critical education and critical race theory to almost unrecognizably repressive lengths. As Eric Lutz points out, DeSantis has taken the

    culture war a step farther, signing laws that will require students and staff at public universities to be surveyed on their political beliefs; bar higher education institutions from preventing access to ideas students may find “uncomfortable, unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive;” and force-feeding K-12 students “portraits in patriotism” that contrasts America with communist and totalitarian regimes.

    In this updated version of apartheid pedagogy and historical cleansing, the call for racial justice is equated to a form of racial hatred leaving intact the refusal to acknowledge, condemn, and confront in the public imagination the history and tenacity of racism in American society. Apartheid pedagogy transforms the criticism of racial injustice and structural racism into a breach of law and makes it an object of malignant state oppression and violence.

    The attack on critical race theory restricts what educators can say and teach in the classroom and does so by invoking the language of fear and retaliation. As Heather Cox Richardson points out in her October 16, 2021, newsletter, teachers who refer to the work of Frederick Douglass, the Chicano movement, women’s suffrage and equal rights, the civil rights movement, Indigenous rights, and the American labor movement all run the risk of losing their jobs in states such as Texas. Many teachers are not just confused about what they can and cannot say in the classroom about social justice issues but also live in daily fear over the consequences they may face “for even broaching nuanced conversations about racism and sexism.” Such fears point to more than the curtailing of freedom of expression and the idealizing of history by whitewashing it. They also identify America’s slide into a re-branded fascist politics that is difficult to ignore. This type of indoctrination and intrusion into shaping the curriculum makes it clear how right-wing Republicans view what it means to be a “patriotic American.” The threat of white supremacy has even been acknowledged by President Joe Biden in a speech he delivered marking the Tulsa race massacre. Biden warned that U.S. democracy was not only in danger but that Americans had to recognize and challenge the “deep roots of racial terror.”

    Legalizing Racial Oppression and Apartheid Pedagogy

    The racialized climate of fear, intimidation and censorship is spreading in the United States. This is evident in the fact that anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) bills have been introduced or passed in 27 state legislatures across the country in order to prevent or limit teachers from teaching about the history of slavery and racism in American society. These reactionary attacks on critical thought and emancipatory forms of pedagogy echo an earlier period in American history. Such attacks are reminiscent of the McCarthy and Red Scare period of the 1950s when heightened paranoia over the threat of communism resulted in a slew of laws that banned the teaching of material deemed unpatriotic, “and required professors to swear loyalty oaths.”

    Such repression is never far from an abyss of ignorance. Right-wing attacks on critical race theory also ignore any work by prominent Black scholars ranging from W.E.B. DuBois and Angela Y. Davis to Audre Lord and James Baldwin. There is no mention of even Derrick Bell, the founder of critical race theory in the 1980s. Nor is there room for complexity, evidence or facts, just as there is no room for either a critique of structural racism or the actual assumptions and influence that make up CRT’s body of work. Such attacks raise fundamental questions about the goal of higher education and role of academics in a time of mounting authoritarianism.

    This is especially true at time when higher education has become a site of derision, an object of censorship, and a way of demonizing faculty and students who address critically matters of racial inequality, social injustice and crucial social problems. Let’s be clear. For the Republican Party, higher education has become a battleground for conducting a race war waged in the spirit of the Confederacy and conducted through the twin registers of censorship and indoctrination. Right-wing politicians now use education and the power of persuasion as weapons to discredit any critical approach to grappling with the history of racial injustice and white supremacy. In doing so, they undermine and discredit the critical faculties necessary for students and others to examine history as a resource in order to “investigate the core conflict between a nation founded on radical notions of liberty, freedom, and equality, and a nation built on slavery, exploitation, and exclusion.” In this context, the language of history appears frozen, stripped of its critical insights, and reduced to a weapon of miseducation. History no longer teaches us what tyranny looks like or to recognize the ethical grounds of resistance. It no longer provides lessons about the courage to act. Ignorance destroys civic culture and undermines democracy by eliminating an informed public capable of understanding and shaping the forces that bear down on their lives.

    Apartheid pedagogy is about disavowal, erasure and disappearance. It promotes a manufactured ignorance in the service of civic death and a flight from ethical and social responsibility. The right-wing attempt to impose “patriotic education” on educators is part of a longstanding counter-revolution that conservatives have waged since the student revolts of the 1960s. The 1960s call by students to democratize the university and open it up to people of color was then considered by many liberals and conservatives as a dangerous expression of dissent. In one famous instance, this was duly noted by ruling class elites such as Harvard professor Samuel Huntington in the Trilateral Commission of 1973 who complained about what was called the “excess of democracy” in the United States. This counter-revolution also fueled the ongoing corporatization of the university in which business models defined how the university is governed, resulting in faculty being reduced to part-time workers, and students being viewed merely as customers and consumers. Another register of this ongoing counter-revolution with its embrace of apartheid pedagogy includes an attempt by Boards of Trustees to remove faculty from making decisions regarding both matters of administrative governance, faculty appointments, and who decides who gets tenure. In addition, many Republican-led states are not only making decisions about what books can or cannot be taught — a decision that should be left up to teachers — but are also calling for what they call teaching opposing views in classrooms. In one instance, a school administrator in charge of curriculum in a Texas school district informed a group of elementary school teachers that “if their classroom libraries included books about the Holocaust, students should also be steered toward books with ‘opposing views,’” as if there were a legitimate opposing view to counter the death of 6 million Jews and others.

    In addition, right-wing legislators have also introduced laws to limit funding to higher education institutions that teach critical race theory. For instance, Ohio Republican State Representative Sarah Fowler Arthur introduced a bill titled “Promoting Education Not Indoctrination Act” that threatens to cut state funding by 25% to any Ohio public university that allows the teaching of critical race theory. Arthur’s disdain for democracy was also evident in her attempts to erase from state-mandated curriculum guidelines any mention of the notion of common good, a view in sympathy with her repugnant views of racism, environmentalism and critical thinking itself. Ron DeSantis has passed legislation that mandates that Florida’s two public universities “use objective, nonpartisan, and statistically valid” surveys to measure “the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives” exist on the campuses. Beyond imposing what amounts to ideological surveys, the law also encourages conservative students to secretly record classes in the event they file a lawsuit against the university. This is about more than censorship; it is about the whitewashing of history and education regarding any issue that is at odds with the right-wing’s notion of patriotic education. As the novelist Francine Prose argues:

    If teachers are obliged to tell their classes that there is “another point of view” about whether the Holocaust occurred, must American history lessons now also include books asserting that the United States was never a slave-holding nation or that racism ended with the Emancipation Proclamation? If the discussion surrounding a novel or story leads a class to conclude that LGBTQ+ people are entitled to basic human rights, must the class be asked to seriously consider the opposing view: that those rights should be denied to anyone who differs from the heterosexual norm?

    Such attacks are also being funded by foundations such as the Heritage Foundation and Manhattan Institute, which often rely on the endorsement of conservative scholars such as Thomas Sowell. Some of most powerful enablers of the attack on “anti-racist programs” in higher education and elsewhere include such as organizations such as the Koch Brothers foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC is particular pernicious given that it increasingly provides the template for anti critical race theory bills which are then used by many state legislators. This is apartheid pedagogy with a vengeance.

    Education Must Develop Young People’s Capacity for Democracy

    One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators, students, and others is the need to address the question of what higher education should accomplish in a precarious democracy? How can educational and pedagogical practices be connected to the resurrection of historical memory, new modes of solidarity, a resurgence of the radical imagination, and broad-based struggles for an insurrectional democracy? How can education be enlisted to fight what the cultural theorist Mark Fisher once called neoliberalism’s most brutal weapon, “the slow cancellation of the future?”

    Such a vision suggests resurrecting a democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond a social order immersed in massive inequality, endless assaults on the environment, and elevates war and militarization to the highest and most sanctified national ideals. Under such circumstances, education becomes more than an obsession with accountability schemes, market values, and an unreflective immersion in the crude empiricism of a data-obsessed market-driven society. Education and pedagogy should provide the conditions for young people to think about keeping a democracy alive and vibrant, not simply training students to be workers. Yes, we must educate young people with the skills they need to get jobs but as educators we must also teach them to learn “to live with less or no misery [and] to fight against those social sources” that cause war, destruction of the environment, “inequality, unhappiness, and needless human suffering.” As Christopher Newfield argues, “democracy needs a public” and higher education has a crucial role to play in this regard as a democratic public good rather than defining itself through the market-based values of neoliberal capitalism.

    One of the most serious challenges facing administrators, faculty, and students in colleges and universities is the task of developing discourses and pedagogical practices that connect classroom knowledge, values and social problems with the larger society, and doing so in ways that enhance the capacities of young people to translate private troubles into wider systemic issues while transforming their hidden despair and private grievances into critical narratives and public transcripts. At best such transcripts can be transformed into forms of public dissent or what might be called moments of rupture or empowering transgressions. Democracy cannot work if citizens are not autonomous, self-judging, curious, reflective and independent — qualities that are indispensable for students if they are going to make vital judgments and choices about participating in and shaping decisions that affect everyday life, institutional reform and governmental policy.

    The current right-wing attacks on education dangerously weaken the critical and democratic impulses of education. Moreover, they are designed strip history of its critical and most troubling elements, and in doing so weaken the pedagogical opportunities for students to develop in free and open exchanges of ideas while undermining the conditions that promote critical thinking, dialogue, and civic engagement. Matters of truth, evidence and reality itself disappear in this form of pedagogical repression. Such actions set the stage for a generation of students unable to distinguish truth from fantasy, unable to resist the false allure and claims of demagogic leaders, and unprepared to reject conspiracy theories and lies. In other words, this form of education prepares them to accept a world where manufactured ignorance is the norm and where repeating the worst elements of the past becomes an unquestioned reality.

    Resistance in this sense begins with the refusal to accept a crudely functional view of education that only values those modes of research, knowledge and teaching that can turn a profit. We must reject educational views that consign administrators, faculty, and students to the prison house of common sense and cynicism. We must reject the attacks on teacher unions and the reduction of knowledge, values and modes of governance to the language of managerial capitalism. We must refuse to turn education into work stations of right-wing ideology and white supremacy, or into factories designed to domesticate thought and cauterize the imagination. We must speak out against the power of bean counters to align educational research with the idolatry of data, which attempts to define the unmeasurable and promote a deadening instrumental rationality that suffocates consciousness. We must resist the empirical frenzies that turn courageous ideas into ashes, all the while degrading civic virtue and ignoring the shadow of a fascist politics engulfing the globe.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Congress, Skulduggery and the Assange Case

    Is the imperium showing suspicions about its intended quarry?  It is hard to believe it, but the US House Intelligence Committee is on a mission of discovery.  Its subject: a Yahoo News report disclosing much material that was already in the public domain on the plot to kidnap or, failing that, poison Julian Assange.  Given that such ideas were aired by officials within the Central Intelligence Agency, this struck home.  On the Yahoo News “Skulduggery” podcast, Committee chairman and Democratic Representative Adam Schiff said, “We are seeking information about it now.”

    Making sure to put himself in the clear of having any knowledge of plans against Assange, Schiff claimed that the committee had sought a response from “the agencies” (the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) after the publication of the Yahoo News piece.  As to whether the agencies had responded, Schiff was not forthcoming.  “I can’t comment on what we’ve heard back yet.”

    This modest effort might show that Schiff is growing a conscience regarding the US case against the founder of WikiLeaks, centred on charges relating to espionage and computer intrusion.  If so, it is a bit late coming, given ample evidence that US intelligence services not only conducted surveillance on Assange while he was in the Ecuadorian embassy in London but contemplated his potential abduction and assassination.

    Had the dozing Schiff cast an eye on last year’s extradition hearings mounted by the US Justice Department in the UK, he would have been privy to the efforts of the Spanish private security firm UC Global, hired by US intelligence operatives, to conduct operations against Assange.  But such humble representatives should not be expected to keep abreast of the news, even as members of a House Intelligence Committee.

    For the rest of us who do, one of the former employees of the Spanish company gave testimony at the Old Bailey claiming that he had been asked to pilfer “a nappy of a baby which according to the company’s security personnel deployed at the embassy, regularly visited Mr Assange”.  As UC Global’s CEO David Morales, currently the subject of a criminal investigation in Spain, explained, “the Americans wanted to establish paternity”.  In December 2017, Assange’s lengthy stay at the embassy was proving so irritating that the “Americans … had even suggested that more extreme measures should be deployed against the ‘guest’ to put an end to the situation”.  One way of doing so would be staging an “accident” that “would allow persons to enter from outside the embassy and kidnap the asylee”.  Very School of the Americas, that.

    Congress has shown some gurgling interest in dropping the case against Assange.  House Resolution 1175, sponsored by then Democrat House Representative Tulsi Gabbard, expressed “the sense of the House of Representatives that newsgathering activities are protected under the First Amendment, and that the United States should drop all charges against and attempts to extradite Julian Assange.”  On the Republican side, former US Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin has also become a convert.  “I made a mistake some years ago, not supporting Julian Assange – thinking that he was a bad guy.”  Since then, she had “learned a lot”. “He deserves a pardon.”

    The phalanx of civil society groups is also urging US Attorney General Merrick Garland to stop the prosecution. On October 15, Garland received a letter signed by 25 organisations including the ACLU, PEN America and Human Rights Watch, raising the US intelligence efforts against Assange as imperilling the case.  “The Yahoo News story only heightens our concerns about the motivations behind this prosecution and about the dangerous precedent that is being set.”  As the joint signatories had stated in a previous letter in February, “News organizations frequently and necessarily publish classified information in order to inform the public of matters of profound significance.”

    Unfortunately, a good number of the US political classes remain vengefully eager.  Many Democrats will never forgive Assange for releasing the Podesta emails and compromising Hillary Clinton’s shoddy electoral campaign in 2016.  The former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo holds up the Republican line, having designated WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia”.

    And no one should forget that the current US President Joe Biden sought the head of WikiLeaks in a manner that was almost childishly enthusiastic while he was Vice President in the Obama administration.  “We are looking at that right now,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press in December 2010.  “The Justice department is taking a look at that.”  Assange exposed and therefore, we depose.  It took some of the more sober individuals in the Obama administration to throw cold water on the effort, arguing that any prosecution of WikiLeaks raised thorny First Amendment issues.  You go for this Australian’s scalp, then where do we stop?  The editorial staff of the New York Times?  The news foragers at the Washington Post?  The opportunities were endlessly dangerous.

    The US prosecution of Assange, centred on that First World War relic of suppression called the Espionage Act, is about to enter its next phase in what can only be described as torture via procedure.  (To date, Assange has been refused bail and left to languish in Belmarsh Prison.)  In the UK High Court, prosecutors are hoping to overturn the findings made by Judge Vanessa Baraitser in her January 4 ruling against extradition, impugning expert evidence on Assange’s mental health and the court’s assessment of it.  These grounds are almost criminally flimsy, but then again, so is this entire effort against this daring, revolutionary publisher.  Assange’s defence team will have much to work with, though Schiff and his colleagues may be asleep as matters unfold.

    The post Congress, Skulduggery and the Assange Case first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Oath Keepers Militia Movement Has Taken Root in the Republican Mainstream

    A member of the right-wing group Oath Keepers stands guard during a rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court Building on January 5, 2021 in Washington, D.C.

    North Carolina state representative Mike Clampitt swore an oath to uphold the Constitution after his election in 2016 and again in 2020. But there’s another pledge that Clampitt said he’s upholding: to the Oath Keepers, a right-wing militant organization.

    Dozens of Oath Keepers have been arrested in connection to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, some of them looking like a paramilitary group, wearing camo helmets and flak vests. But a list of more than 35,000 members of the Oath Keepers — obtained by an anonymous hacker and shared with ProPublica by the whistleblower group Distributed Denial of Secrets — underscores how the organization is evolving into a force within the Republican Party.

    ProPublica identified Clampitt and 47 more state and local government officials on the list, all Republicans: 10 sitting state lawmakers; two former state representatives; one current state assembly candidate; a state legislative aide; a city council assistant; county commissioners in Indiana, Arizona and North Carolina; two town aldermen; sheriffs or constables in Montana, Texas and Kentucky; state investigators in Texas and Louisiana; and a New Jersey town’s public works director.

    ProPublica’s analysis also found more than 400 people who signed up for membership or newsletters using government, military or political campaign email addresses, including candidates for Congress and sheriff, a retired assistant school superintendent in Alabama, and an award-winning elementary school teacher in California.

    Three of the state lawmakers on the list had already been publicly identified with the Oath Keepers. Other outlets have also scoured the list, finding police officers and military veterans.

    People with law enforcement and military backgrounds — like Clampitt, a retired fire captain in Charlotte, North Carolina — have been the focus of the Oath Keepers’ recruiting efforts since the group started in 2009. According to researchers who monitor the group’s activities, Oath Keepers pledge to resist if the federal government imposes martial law, invades a state or takes people’s guns, ideas that show up in a dark swirl of right-wing conspiracy theories. The group is loosely organized and its leaders do not centrally issue commands. The organization’s roster has ballooned in recent years, from less than 10,000 members at the start of 2011 to more than 35,000 by 2020, membership records show.

    The hacked list marks participants as annual ($50) or lifetime ($1,000) members, so not everyone on the list is currently active, though some said they viewed it as a lifelong commitment even if they only paid for one year. Many members said they had little contact with the group after sending in their dues but still supported the cause. Others drifted away and disavowed the group, even before Jan. 6.

    The list also includes at least three people who were arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and who federal prosecutors did not identify as Oath Keepers in charging documents: Andrew Alan Hernandez of Riverside, California; Dawn Frankowski of Naperville, Illinois; and Sean David Watson of Alpine, Texas. They pleaded not guilty. These defendants, their attorneys and family members didn’t respond to requests for comment. The Justice Department also declined to comment.

    According to experts who monitor violent extremism, the Oath Keepers’ broadening membership provides the group with two crucial resources: money and, particularly when government officials get involved, legitimacy.

    Clampitt said he went to a few Oath Keepers meetings when he joined back in 2014, but the way he participates now is by being a state legislator. He has co-sponsored a bill to allow elected officials to carry concealed guns in courthouses, schools and government buildings, and he supported legislation stiffening penalties for violent demonstrations in response to last year’s protests in Raleigh over George Floyd’s murder. Clampitt said he opposes violence but stood by his Oath Keepers affiliation, despite the dozens of members charged in the Capitol riot.

    “Five or six years ago, politicians wouldn’t be caught dead hanging out with Oath Keepers, you’d have to go pretty fringe,” said Jared Holt, who monitors the group for the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “When groups like that become emboldened, it makes them significantly more dangerous.”

    The State Lawmakers

    Then-state Delegate Don Dwyer from Maryland was the only elected official at the Oath Keepers’ first rally, back in April 2009. Dwyer was, by his own account, a pariah in Annapolis, but he was building a national profile as a conservative firebrand. He claimed to take direction from his own interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and a personal library of 230 books about U.S. history pre-1900.

    The Oath Keepers’ founder, a former Army paratrooper and Yale Law School graduate named Stewart Rhodes, invited Dwyer to speak at the group’s kickoff rally — they called it a “muster” — in Lexington, Massachusetts, the site of the “shot heard round the world” that started the Revolutionary War in 1775.

    “I still support the cause,” Dwyer told ProPublica. “And I’m proud to say that I’m a member of that organization.” He left politics in 2015 and served six months in prison for violating his probation after a drunk boating accident.

    Dwyer said he was not aware of the Oath Keeper’s presence at the Capitol on Jan. 6. “If they were there, they were there on a peaceful mission, I’m sure of it,” he said. Informed that members were photographed wearing tactical gear, Dwyer responded, “OK, that surprises me. That’s all I’ll say.”

    Among the current officeholders on the list is Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem, who was already publicly identified with the Oath Keepers. Finchem was outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 but has said he did not enter the building or engage in violence, and he has disputed the characterization of the Oath Keepers as an anti-government group. He is currently running to be Arizona’s top elections official, and he won former President Donald Trump’s endorsement in September.

    Serving with Clampitt in the North Carolina assembly, deputy majority whip Keith Kidwell appeared on the Oath Keepers list as an annual member in 2012. Kidwell declined to comment, calling the membership list “stolen information.” A spokesperson for the state house speaker declined to comment on Kidwell’s and Clampitt’s Oath Keepers affiliation.

    The membership list also names Alaska state Rep. David Eastman as a life member and Indiana state Sen. Scott Baldwin and Georgia state Rep. Steve Tarvin as annual members. Eastman confirmed his membership and declined to answer further questions. Baldwin’s spokesperson said he was unavailable to comment.

    Tarvin recalled signing up at a booth in White County, Georgia, in 2009 when he was running for Congress. He lost that race but later became a state lawmaker. He didn’t view the Oath Keepers as a militia group back then.

    Tarvin said he stands by the pledge he signed and said he isn’t aware of the Oath Keepers’ involvement in the Capitol breach on Jan 6. His congressional district is now represented by Andrew Clyde, who helped barricade a door to the House chamber on Jan. 6 but later compared the riot to a “normal tourist visit.”

    Kaye Beach, who is listed as an annual member in 2010, is a legislative assistant to Oklahoma state Rep. Jon Echols, the majority floor leader. Beach sued the state in 2011, arguing that the Bible prohibited taking a driver’s license photo of her. She eventually lost at the state supreme court. Beach and Echols did not respond to requests for comment.

    Two other lawmakers have long been public about their affiliation with the Oath Keepers.

    Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers announced her membership a few years ago. She responded to Trump’s 2020 loss by encouraging people to buy ammo and recently demanded to “decertify” the election based on the GOP’s “audit” of Maricopa County ballots, even though the partisan review confirmed President Joe Biden’s win.

    Idaho state Rep. Chad Christensen lists his Oath Keepers membership on his official legislative biography, in between the John Birch Society and the Idaho Farm Bureau.

    Rogers and Christensen didn’t respond to requests for comment.

    South Dakota state legislator Phil Jensen appeared on the list as an annual member in 2014, using his title (then state senator) and government email address. His affiliation was reported Tuesday by Rolling Stone. He did not respond to a request for comment.

    South Dakota state Sen. Jim Stalzer, whose 2015 annual membership was first reported by BuzzFeed, said he never renewed his membership and stopped supporting the Oath Keepers because he disagreed with “their confrontational approach to what they view as federal overreach.” In an email, Stalzer said he supported peaceful demonstrators on Jan. 6 but “we do not have the right to damage property or harm others, whether it be at the Capitol or anywhere else.”

    The Candidates

    Virginia Fuller first encountered the Oath Keepers in 2009 at a meeting in San Francisco featuring Rhodes, the group’s founder. Fuller liked Rhodes’ message of upholding the Constitution, she told ProPublica. For a while she corresponded with one of the group’s leaders but they eventually lost touch, and she moved to Florida and ran unsuccessfully for Congress on the Republican ticket in 2018.

    Rhodes and other leaders of the Oath Keepers embraced Trump’s lies about election fraud and promoted Jan. 6 as a last chance to make a stand for the republic. Asked about Jan. 6, Fuller said, “There was nothing wrong with that. The Capitol belongs to the people.”

    The Oath Keepers rose to prominence when handfuls of heavily armed members showed up at racial justice protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, and their profile grew thanks to a series of standoffs between right-wing militants and federal agents in the Western U.S.

    At the 2016 funeral for a rancher who officers shot while trying to arrest him, Stan Vaughan met several Oath Keepers and became an annual member. Vaughan, a one-time chess champion from Las Vegas, ran unsuccessfully as a Republican for the Nevada State Assembly in 2016, 2018 and 2020. Even though Vaughan ran in a predominantly Democratic district, he had the support of his party’s establishment, receiving a $500 campaign contribution from Robin Titus, the Assembly’s Republican floor leader. Titus did not respond to requests for comment. Vaughan said he’ll probably run again once he sees how new districts are drawn.

    Vaughan said he wouldn’t join the Oath Keepers today. It’s not their ideology that bothers him or their involvement in the Jan. 6 riot. Rather, he said he has concerns about how the group’s leaders spend its money.

    One Oath Keeper seen on Jan. 6 wearing an earpiece and talking with group leaders outside the Capitol was Edward Durfee, a local Republican committee member in Bergen County, New Jersey, who is running for state assembly in a predominantly Democratic district. Durfee has not been charged and said he did not enter the building.

    “They were caught up in the melee, what else can I say? For whatever reason, I didn’t go in,” Durfee said. “They brand you as white supremacists, domestic terrorists. I don’t know how we got in this mix where there’s so much hatred and so much dislike and how it continues to get fomented. It’s just shameful actually.”

    The Local Party Officials

    When Joe Marmorato, a retired New York City cop who moved upstate, signed up for an Oath Keepers annual membership in 2013, he described the skills he could offer the group: “Pistol Shooting, police street tactics, driving skills, County Republican committee member.” Marmorato later rose to vice chairman of the Otsego County GOP, but he recently resigned that post because he’s moving. Reached by phone, Marmorato stood by the Oath Keepers, even after Jan. 6. “I just thought they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing. I know most of them are all retired police and firemen and have the best interests of the country in mind,” he said. “No matter what you do, you’re vilified by the left.”

    Steven K. Booth, a twice-elected Republican county commissioner and state senate candidate in Minnesota in the 2000s, said he wants to run for office again if his wife agrees to it. He’s still active in the local GOP. Booth joined the Oath Keepers as an annual member in 2011 and said he hasn’t heard from them in years. He said he wasn’t aware of their role in Jan. 6 but he’s concerned that some Capitol breach defendants are being held in jail. “That seems kind of weird to me,” Booth said. “I also think it’s kind of weird that nobody is doing anything about all the fraud we were told about in the last election either.”

    Asked about the possibility of Booth running for office again, local GOP chair Rich Siegert started talking through openings Booth could aim for. Booth’s Oath Keepers affiliation did not give Siegert pause. “When tyranny comes, that’s when you stop and say you’ve got to do something about it,” said Siegert, who heads the party in northern Minnesota’s Beltrami County. “To go out and get violent and kill people like they did in the early days, I’m not really in favor of that. How do you get the attention of liberals and get them to listen? Firing guns, I don’t know, it’s what they do in some countries. Define what ‘radical’ is.”

    Not all party officials shared Siegert’s view. Richland County, South Carolina, GOP chair Tyson Grinstead distanced his committee from Patsy Stewart, who is listed as an Oath Keepers annual member in 2015. “Personally,” Grinstead said, “I don’t think there’s a place for that in our party.”

    Stewart has been a delegate or alternate to the GOP state convention and is currently a party precinct officer in Columbia, South Carolina. She didn’t respond to requests for comment. In recent months, Trump supporters have flooded into precinct positions in South Carolina and other states as part of an organized movement inspired by the stolen election myth, ProPublica reported in September.

    The Poll Worker

    When Andy Maul signed up for the Oath Keepers as an annual member around 2010, he touted his role in the Pittsburgh GOP. Maul said he let his membership lapse because there wasn’t a local chapter, but he still likes the group’s concept.

    Maul became the party chairman of his city council district starting around 2016. But other local party leaders chafed at Maul’s confrontational style and lack of follow-through.

    “Andy was getting a little out there,” said Allegheny County chairman Sam DeMarco, who had to ask Maul to take down some of his inflammatory social media posts. “If you want to be associated with our committee, you have to represent mainstream traditional Republican values and not be affiliated with fringe groups.”

    Maul left the local party committee in 2020, but he continued serving as a poll worker. According to the county elections department, Maul was the “judge of elections” in charge of his precinct in every election since 2017, including this year’s primary in May.

    In Pennsylvania, the judge of elections in every precinct is an elected position. If no one runs, as often happens, the local elections office appoints someone to fill in, so a person can sometimes land the job “if you have a pulse and you call them,” said Bob Hillen, the Pittsburgh Republican chairman.

    “If I opposed people based on their views for being a judge of elections or anything, that would eliminate a whole lot of people,” Hillen said. “I’m a city chairman, I don’t have time to think about all those things like that.”

    Maul said he observed “aberrative” ballots at his precinct on Nov. 3 — just a handful, but he asserted that if the same number occurred at every precinct in the state, it would add up to more than Biden’s margin of victory. (There is no evidence of widespread fraud that could have affected the outcome in Pennsylvania or any other state.)

    On Jan. 6, Maul said he marched toward the Capitol but couldn’t make it all the way and returned to his bus. He said he wasn’t familiar with the Oath Keepers’ activities that day. “As a supporter of the Constitution, I had strong differences and concerns about Trump,” Maul said in a text message. “Although my feeling on Trump were mixed, I went to the Jan. 6 rally mainly due to what I experienced at my polling location.”

    The Democrat

    Around 2005, Marine veteran Bob Haran joined the Minuteman Project, a group of armed people who took it upon themselves to patrol Arizona’s border with Mexico. Haran resented that critics called the group vigilantes and Mexican hunters. All they did, he said, was call the Border Patrol.

    Haran held positions in the local GOP and had run for the state House as a Republican. During the tea party wave, Haran became frustrated with the new activists’ anti-government tilt and turned to the Constitution Party, a minor party that’s to the right of the GOP. Haran rose to be the state chairman and secretary. By the time he became an Oath Keepers annual member in 2016, Haran was looking for a new political home.

    When Trump rode down a golden escalator to launch his presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” Haran took offense. He faulted the government for failing to secure the border, but he didn’t blame people for seeking better lives for themselves and their families. Haran grew up in Coney Island, near a middle-class apartment complex built by Trump’s father, and he remembered Trump as a braggadocious playboy, not as the successful self-made businessman he later played on TV. Haran said he was appalled as Republicans fell in line behind Trump.

    Then, Haran did something unusual, even among never-Trump Republicans: He became a Democrat.

    Haran doesn’t agree with the Democrats on everything, but he said he feels welcome in the party. He’s still passionate about guns and immigration, but he also supports environmental protections and universal health care. Above all, he wanted to help get rid of Trump. In 2020, he joined his local precinct committee and started regularly attending party meetings.

    Haran was so excited to see Trump leave office that he tuned in to watch the Electoral College certification process on Jan. 6. He couldn’t believe how fast the Trump supporters reached the Senate floor, or how Oath Keepers were attacking the Constitution they swore to defend.

    Haran thought back to when he ran for office as a Republican, in 2000, and lost. “I called my opponent and congratulated him: I would have won except he got more votes,” Haran said. “I conceded, which is bestowing legitimacy on my opponent, which is more important than anything.”

    He finds it disturbing that Trump and other Republicans today won’t do that anymore. “They were anti-government,” Haran said of the GOP, “but now they’re being anti-democracy.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • AOC: GOP Opposes Build Back Better Because They Fear “A Changing Country”

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talks with a reporter on the House steps of the U.S. Capitol on August 3, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    When asked about Republicans’ refusal to negotiate with Democrats on the Build Back Better Act, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) said that the GOP is upset because the country’s attitudes and demographics are changing.

    “I think that they are upset about a changing country,” Ocasio-Cortez said, adding that Republicans are angered by their inability to get a legitimate majority elected to Congress due to having “a very narrow homogenous, classist base.”

    The GOP is also upset about an increase in “class consciousness and racial consciousness” among the electorate, which is “seriously disrupting the status quo of American politics,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

    “They are scared and they are angry and they are doing absolutely everything possible to ensure that we disenfranchise the very people and communities that have the power of changing this country for the better,” the New York Democrat went on. Because of this, GOP lawmakers are “not even considering voting” for the reconciliation package, which contains transformative social spending proposals that could improve many of those people’s lives, she added.

    The comments were made during an online panel hosted by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) on Wednesday night. The event, which was titled “What’s in the Damn Bill?” sought to promote passage of the reconciliation package.

    Sanders and his panel guests didn’t address the current negotiations on the bill during the online broadcast, focusing instead on general proposals included within it. However, recent events seem to indicate that what was once a robust anti-poverty and climate-crisis-combatting bill will now be watered down in significant ways.

    In order to placate demands from conservative Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona), Biden has signaled support for lowering the overall cost of the package from $3.5 trillion over the next 10 years to somewhere between $1.75 trillion and $1.9 trillion.

    Such cuts would significantly reduce the plan’s scope. Instead of having 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, workers would only be able to count on four weeks of benefits. Proposed Medicare spending would also face downsizing. The bill, which originally included dental, vision and hearing benefits for seniors, may now only include dental — and only as a “pilot program” rather than universal rollout.

    Polling has found that voters prefer a reconciliation package that is more far-reaching. A recent CBS News survey revealed that 84 percent of Americans favor an expansion of Medicare that includes all items, not just dental. Additionally, 73 percent of the poll’s respondents back the plan to provide longer paid family and medical leave.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Texas GOP’s Electoral Map Gives White People Disproportionate Control Over State

    Texas State Representatives Mary Ann Perez, center, and Christina Morales, right, attend a news conference with members of the Texas House Democratic Caucus outside the U.S. Capitol on August 6, 2021.

    The Texas legislature passed a new congressional map on Monday that gives disproportionate favor to Republicans and marginalizes the influence of nonwhite voters.

    The map was passed by the Senate and the House largely on party lines, with nearly all Republicans voting in favor. Democrats have condemned the map, saying that the redistricting process was squeezed into the legislature’s special 30 day session, giving little time for discussion or public input. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is expected to sign the map into law, which will give Republicans disproportionate control over the state for the next decade.

    According to the Census Bureau, Texas’s population is about 41 percent white non-Latinx, nearly 40 percent Latinx, approximately 5 percent Asian and nearly 13 percent Black. Under the maps approved by the legislature, however, white people represent a majority in 60 percent of the congressional districts, as Mother Jones’s Ari Berman points out. Meanwhile, Latinx people represent a majority in only 18 percent of districts, and Black and Asian people do not represent a majority in any district.

    Though the Texas GOP’s redistricted maps were already discriminatory in 2010, this round is slated to disenfranchise nonwhite voters even more than before. Whereas Latinx residents represented a majority in eight districts over the past decade, there will only be seven such districts in the new maps, despite Latinx residents making up about half of Texas’s new residents over the last ten years.

    Due to the state’s population growth, Texas will be gaining two additional seats in the House. But, despite nearly all of the new population being people of color, the new map gives both seats to majority-white districts.

    The new maps also consolidate and empower the GOP in particular, in the year after Texas was briefly poised to go blue in the 2020 election. Under the new map, the number of safe Republican seats would double from 11 to 22, with nearly the entire state becoming deep red districts with some Democratic strongholds like Dallas, Houston and Austin.

    Democratic state lawmakers criticized the new map. “What we’re doing in passing this congressional map is a disservice to the people of Texas,” said Rep. Rafael Anchía before the vote. “What we’re doing is hurtful to millions of Texans — it’s shameful.”

    Texas Democrats had fled the state this summer in attempts to block the Republicans’ voter suppression package, but were forced to return and restore quorum in the legislature when Republicans threatened to arrest them.

    Several civil rights groups have sued Texas over the map. The plaintiffs, represented by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), say that the new maps violate the Voting Rights Act because they disenfranchise Latinx voters.

    “Violation of voting rights is not a partisan issue,” said Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel for MALDEF. “Still, Texas has a uniquely deplorable record in its consistent disregard of Latino population growth over half a century of redistricting.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ocasio-Cortez Slams GOP for Lying About Effects of Unemployment Insurance

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) speaks to reporters before a House Democratic caucus meeting at the U.S. Capitol on October 01, 2021 in Washington, D.C.

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) criticized a Republican colleague on Thursday, pointing out that the GOP’s stance on unemployment insurance is not only misguided but factually incorrect.

    Her criticism was in response to a statement by Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tennessee), who tweeted, “4.3 million workers quit their jobs. We need to quit paying folks not to work.” His tweet refers to recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that a record number of people quit their jobs in August. But most people who quit their jobs aren’t eligible to collect unemployment benefits — and the unemployment insurance program that Burchett is likely referring to has already ended.

    “Y’all already [ended unemployment insurance] over a month ago despite everyone having data that ending [unemployment insurance] doesn’t push people back to work,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in response. “Conservatives love to act like they’re ‘fiscally savvy’ yet remain puzzled as to why people can’t work a job whose pay won’t even cover the childcare costs to work.”

    Despite Burchett’s declaration that “paying folks not to work” decreases employment rates, the past few months have borne evidence that the opposite is true: Unemployment insurance has actually improved employment rates. This summer, 26 states ended extra unemployment aid early; those states went on to experience slower employment growth than the states that kept the program through the beginning of September

    The pandemic has been challenging for working parents — particularly for women, who often bear a disproportionate burden when it comes to childcare. Reports have found that 1 in 4 women are considering quitting or reducing their hours in order to help take care of their children.

    Meanwhile, paying for childcare is becoming increasingly inaccessible. Last month, the Treasury Department wrote that the current system of low wages and skyrocketing childcare costs is unsustainable. The average family with a child under 5 must spend around 13 percent of their family’s income on childcare, the Treasury found — an amount well past the 7 percent of a family’s income that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) deems affordable for childcare.

    Ocasio-Cortez went on to explain that the GOP’s refusal to understand why workers are quitting in droves is contradictory to their stated beliefs about the way the economy works.

    “Quitting being [unemployment insurance] ineligible aside, the idea that laziness is why people stay home contradicts the ‘free market ideals’ these folks pretend to champion,” she wrote. “Markets apply to labor, too. If supply is low and demand high, price goes up. People seem to accept that for everything but wages.”

    Workers, especially those with frontline jobs, have indeed cited low wages as a reason to consider quitting their jobs during the pandemic. A report in May found that of the 53 percent of restaurant workers surveyed who said they have considered quitting, 76 percent cited low wages and tips as a top reason why.

    The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has also pointed out that the conservative “worker shortage” myth is likely more attributable to labor market dynamics.

    “When restaurant owners can’t find workers to fill openings at wages that aren’t meaningfully higher than they were before the pandemic — even though the jobs are inherently more stressful and potentially dangerous because workers now have to deal with anti-maskers and ongoing health concerns — that’s not a labor shortage, that’s the market functioning,” EPI wrote in May. “The wages for a harder, riskier job should be higher.”

    Ocasio-Cortez concluded by pointing out that the reasoning behind people’s employment decisions often isn’t as simple as the GOP implies. “And by the way, free time is VALUABLE,” she said. “People pay for time routinely, whether it’s in delivery, services, etc. It’s not lazy to stay home with family — it can lower costs. 700k+ people in the US have died of COVID so far. Do people think that has no impact on labor supply/capacity?”

    Last month, Ocasio-Cortez introduced a bill that would extend unemployment benefits until February of next year and would make payments retroactive to September, when the benefits expired. Though lawmakers neglected to reinstate the federal unemployment program, the Census Bureau found that the program kept 5.5 million people from experiencing poverty in 2020.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Branch Covidians are Waging War on Humanity

    All embarked, the party launched out on the sea’s foaming lanes while the son of Atreus told his troops to wash, to purify themselves from the filth of the plague. They scoured it off, threw scourings in the surf and sacrificed to Apollo full-grown bulls and goats along the beaten shore of the fallow barren sea and savory smoke went swirling up the skies.

    — Homer, The Iliad (1.365-370)

    The Biden administration’s announcement that Americans employed in companies with over 100 employees would be compelled to take an experimental gene therapy in explicit violation of the Nuremberg Code has opened a new front in the biofascist assault on democracy. Businesses and government agencies that fail to enforce this mandate will potentially face draconian fines. Should the oligarchy succeed in completely weaponizing health care, vaccine passports would undoubtedly become both pervasive and mandatory, but as Tucker Carlson pointed out during one of his recent monologues, it is also likely that dissidents would be handed over to the Cult of Psychiatry. This is not an uncommon practice in police states, and the pathologization of dissent has been ongoing in the West for quite some time now. Only through knowledge, compassion, and camaraderie can the forces of neo-Nazi medicine be outflanked. The days of medical Armageddon are upon us.

    As the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and its European counterpart unequivocally demonstrate, the Covid vaccine program is causing tremendous harm and should have been terminated many months ago. Even the efficacy of the vaccines is very much in doubt, as evidenced by soaring Covid case numbers in some of the most vaccinated places on earth, such as the Seychelles (see here and here), Israel (see here, here, here and here), Gibraltar and Iceland. As physician assistant Deborah Conrad pointed out in her interview with The HighWire, VAERS is so dysfunctional that many doctors and nurses are only vaguely aware of its existence.

    Addressing the “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Joseph Mercola, MD, writes on Mercola.com:

    In a June 29, 2021, interview, Fauci called the Delta variant ‘a game-changer’ for unvaccinated people, warning it will devastate the unvaccinated population while vaccinated individuals are protected against it. Alas, in the real world, the converse is turning out to be true, as the Delta variant is running wild primarily among those who got the Covid jab.

    As Dr. James Lyons-Weiler and other experts without ties to industry have noted, coronavirus vaccines have long had a poor safety record. Indeed, when scientists attempted to create a vaccine for SARS-CoV-1 the laboratory animals all died due to pathogenic priming.

    The vaccine mandates are causing middle class professionals to quit their jobs in droves, from highly trained fighter pilots, to large numbers of nurses leading to maternity wards being shuttered. In what is reminiscent of the anthrax vaccine (administered to the military despite the lack of both informed consent and FDA approval), army doctors are now observing serious adverse events in formerly healthy soldiers. The Covid vaccine drive has surpassed even the psychopathy of the Nazi doctors, as it would have been inconceivable to senior physicians in the Third Reich to give all of German society an experimental vaccine.

    In an incident that underscores how delusional the mass media has become, WXYZ-TV in Detroit, an ABC affiliate, reached out to people on Facebook for stories of Americans who died of Covid because they delayed getting vaccinated, but were instead inundated with thousands of stories of people who were killed or seriously injured by the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) gene therapies.

    Not only has a two-tier society emerged where the unvaccinated are being denied the right to work, attend university, eat out, go to sporting events, and enjoy the performing and visual arts; but another two-tier society has also emerged, one which has been evolving for quite some time now: the mega rich – for whom none of these draconian rules will apply – and everyone else. Video from a Democratic Party fundraiser hosted by Nancy Pelosi in Napa Valley has emerged showing affluent liberals rubbing shoulders unmasked while their brown servants wear masks. Masks and social distancing were apparently not required at the recent Met Gala in New York, where celebrities get to hobnob, have shallow conversations, and show off their outlandish costumes while millions of their countrymen wallow in unemployment, hopelessness, and despair.

    And it would seem that New York City mayor Bill de Blasio (whose real name incidentally is Warren Wilhelm Jr.) is not the only one who delights in imposing punitive measures on those who opt for the control group, with museums and concert halls enthusiastically embracing the heinous practice. The Guggenheim has even written on their website in conjunction with their vaccine requirement that “We focus on safety so you can immerse yourself in art.” (Thankfully, I have a lot of art books).

    What will transpire if the mandates remain in place? Will our leaders order their minions to shut off the water of the unvaccinated? Will workers and students be compelled to take an experimental AIDS vaccine or submit to weekly testing? These injunctions are unethical, discriminatory, and unconstitutional, as they transform inalienable rights into privileges which must be earned by participating in a dangerous medical experiment. Restaurants in Manhattan, which have some of the highest commercial rents in the world, are naturally reluctant to enforce these regulations, yet run the risk of being snitched on by Branch Covidian undercover operatives.

    Such an incestuous relationship has formed between the FDA, CDC, NIH, NIAID and the pharmaceutical industry, that going to the websites for these agencies invariably yields information that mirrors what is posted on the drug company websites. There is robust science indicating that natural immunity is stronger than vaccine-induced immunity. There is likewise compelling evidence that face masks do more harm than good, yet these facts continue to be ignored by the presstitutes – a gaggle of clowns also on industry payroll.

    When reporter Emerald Robinson asked White House principal deputy secretary Karine Jean-Pierre how doctors were testing for the Delta variant, Jean-Pierre became defensive, demanding that we stop asking questions and follow “the experts.” They know best after all, who when not registering vaccinated deaths as unvaccinated and artificially inflating the Covid death toll, are busy turning the country into a nation of opioid, heroin (the two are inextricably linked), fentanyl, barbiturate, benzodiazepine, and psychotropic drug addicts. (American doctors even once prescribed cocaine and heroin). Speaking at the Washington National Cathedral, our imaginary president, Dr. Fauci, said that he was sympathetic to Brits and Americans who are accustomed to certain post-Medieval rights and freedoms, “but now is the time to do what you’re told.”

    The FDA “approval” for the Pfizer Covid vaccine attempts to conflate EUA investigational agents with FDA-approved drugs, as FDA has not approved the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, which is still in use, but the Pfizer Comirnaty Covid vaccine, which isn’t even available. The FDA has argued that the two vaccines are indistinguishable from one another and that they can be used interchangeably, which is absurd. Any drug under the auspices of an EUA is by law experimental and cannot be mandated. Senator Ron Johnson wrote a letter to FDA Acting Commissioner Woodcock requesting clarification on this preposterous state of affairs.

    It is curious that Hydroxychloroquine is somehow safe as a maintenance drug for lupus, yet suddenly becomes dangerous when used to treat SARS-CoV-2, even if only taken for a very short period of time. Here is the website lupus.org:

    Given the drug’s many and varied beneficial effects and its excellent long-standing safety profile, most rheumatologists believe that Hydroxychloroquine should be taken by people with lupus throughout their lifetime. [Italics added]

    The FDA temporarily authorized the use of Hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 in March of 2020, but only with hospitalized patients. The FDA notice read as follows:

    Hydroxychloroquine sulfate may only be used to treat adult and adolescent patients who weigh 50 kg or more and are hospitalized with COVID-19, for whom a clinical trial is not available, or participation is not feasible.

    As Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, Dr. Peter McCullough, and others have noted, Covid protocols using Hydroxychloroquine and other zinc ionophores are most efficacious early in the disease process. In other words, the FDA denied permission for doctors to use a medication for outpatient care where it has been shown to significantly reduce hospitalization and death, but allowed the drug to be used for hospitalized patients where the disease has often spiraled out of control, thereby setting the drug up to fail. Dr. Simone Gold has argued that the prevalence of Hydroxychloroquine in Africa, where it is frequently obtainable as an over-the-counter drug for malaria treatment and prophylaxis, has played a significant role in protecting the continent from Covid.

    So eager were the Branch Covidians to torpedo Hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for SARS-CoV-2 that they conducted dangerous and unethical trials where patients were deliberately overdosed and given toxic quantities of the drug, likely causing some of the trial participants to die, and causing even far more deaths when public health agencies around the world advised (or in some instances, ordered) doctors to stop using a life-saving medication as a treatment for COVID-19.

    Writing for The Defender, the newsletter for Children’s Health Defense, Jeremy Loffredo points out that in addition to threatening the profits of the mRNA vaccines, Hydroxychloroquine posed a threat to the profits of Gilead, the manufacturer of Remdesivir:

    Since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, dozens of new studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of Hydroxychloroquine and its first cousin, Chloroquine, against Covid. These studies occurred in China, France, Saudi Arabia, Italy, India, New York and Michigan. However, such proof of Hydroxychloroquine’s benefit to patients with Covid has posed an existential threat to Gilead sales throughout the Covid outbreak.

    Remdesivir costs over $3,000 per treatment and has been linked to serious and potentially life-threatening side effects. Nevertheless, if a drug is profitable safety, necessity, and efficacy are disregarded. It becomes “the standard of care.”

    Having had their fill of demonizing Hydroxychloroquine, the presstitutes and pharmaceutical sock puppets turned their vitriol on another unpatentable drug, Ivermectin. Described as “a multifaceted drug of Nobel prize-honoured distinction” by the journal New Microbes and New Infections, Ivermectin has played a critical role in combating onchocerciasis, also known as river blindness. Writing for The Lancet, Michel Boussinesq, MD, PhD, points out that “Ivermectin has been widely used for 30 years to combat onchocerciasis and is rightly considered a wonder drug.” In African countries where Ivermectin is regularly taken as an anti-parasitic Covid deaths have been negligible. Elaborating on this point, Kenyan doctors Stephen Karanga and Wahome Ngare pointed out in a Klartext podcast that due to Ivermectin’s effectiveness in treating Covid they weren’t worried about SARS-CoV-2; their real concerns lay with car accidents, HIV, and malaria.

    Meanwhile, the FDA refuses to even acknowledge that Ivermectin can be used in humans, tweeting “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” (Yes, those are some of the smartest people in the world). This villainy is not without precedent, as millions of Americans were prescribed highly addictive opioids as opposed to safer and more inexpensive over-the-counter pain medications. The sacking of Canadian emergency physician Dr. Daniel Nagase, who was found guilty of saving the lives of his Covid patients with Ivermectin, underscores the fact that the elites will stop at nothing to prolong the pandemic.

    In addition to fomenting the cult-like notion that a vaccine is a magical elixir for which no risk-benefit analysis is needed, the media has played a critical role in deceiving hundreds of millions of people around the world into believing that Covid is equally dangerous to all patients irregardless of age and preexisting conditions. This, in turn, has led to Black Death levels of hysteria, as evidenced by unvaccinated locals in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh being forced to wear placards displaying the skull and crossbones.

    Physicians who attempt to treat Covid early using Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) and Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) protocols are being vilified as quacks and snake oil salesmen, while doctors who are killing staggering numbers of people through a combination of nontreatment and dangerous experimental drugs are hailed as heroes. In many ways, this is the essence of biofascism: care patients desperately need is denied them, while dangerous care is imposed through coercion – both monstrous violations of the oath to do no harm.

    It is not uncommon for physicians to prescribe FDA-approved drugs to treat conditions that are different from what the drug was initially intended for. This is referred to as “off-label use” or “off-label prescribing.” How will a high-risk patient who contracts Covid benefit from masks, social distancing, lockdowns and vaccines (even if they were safe and effective)? They need something that will ward off the inflammatory phase of the disease and keep the ventilator at bay. This suppression of early treatment options has failed to escape the attention of the Indian Bar Association, which has sought criminal charges against WHO Chief Scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan for making fallacious claims about Ivermectin to protect the Church of Vaccinology.

    A passage from the Rome Declaration, established at the Rome Covid Summit, and signed by over 10,000 doctors and scientists, states the following:

    WHEREAS, thousands of physicians are being prevented from providing treatment to their patients, as a result of barriers put up by pharmacies, hospitals, and public health agencies, rendering the vast majority of healthcare providers helpless to protect their patients in the face of disease. Physicians are now advising their patients to simply go home (allowing the virus to replicate) and return when their disease worsens, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary patient deaths, due to failure-to-treat;

    WHEREAS, this is not medicine. This is not care. These policies may actually constitute crimes against humanity.

    In the Age of Faucism, everyone who arrives at an American emergency room is being given a PCR test, and if it indicates that they have the virus (not unlikely considering the prevalence of false positives), their loved ones are summarily kicked out of the hospital, they are put into isolation, given drugs of dubious safety and efficacy, and even intubated. Dr. Jane Ruby has referred to these Covid obsessed hospitals as “the new ovens.” Furthermore, physicians are being threatened with revocation of their licenses should they be found guilty of “spreading misinformation” – a practice also commonly referred to as informed consent.

    Hitler’s physicians were fond of euthanizing the mentally ill, and it would appear that their heirs are equally enamored with the practice, as the mentally handicapped have been vaccinated by force and with armed police present in Los Angeles. Children in Toronto have been given the experimental jab, without parental permission, and in exchange for free ice cream, while irate parents were prevented from entering the grounds. Not to be outdone, whistleblowers from Aegis Living, an assisted living facility for the aged, have reported that residents have been “chemically restrained” and injected with the investigational mRNA biologicals without their knowledge. As Dr. Lee Merritt said in a talk with Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, “We have a whole society doing what we tried the Nazi doctors for.”

    As evidenced by the CDC vaccine schedule (a growing list of mandates coupled with liability protection for the manufacturer), and the fact that parents can be charged with “medical neglect” should they object to their children being placed on psychotropic drugs, the American public school system has long been in the grip of late-stage biofascism. To add insult to injury, toddlers are now being forced to wear masks and the mRNA biologicals are being injected into minors. Children’s Health Defense has reported that “Pfizer’s Covid vaccine could be rolled out to babies as young as 6 months in the U.S. this winter — under plans being drawn up by the pharmaceutical giant.”

    Australia offers another window into our future should we fail to save humanity from the hordes of Faucism. Indeed, this has become a country where farmers’ markets are shut down by riot police, senior health officials tell their countrymen not to talk to one another so as to prevent transmission of a virus, pregnant women are arrested in their pajamas for attempting to organize anti-lockdown rallies on the Internet, women are violently choked by sadistic goons for leaving their homes unmasked, young children are pepper sprayed and brutalized for committing the aforementioned sin, citizens are committed (or “sectioned” as they say in Britain) for questioning the official Covid narrative, rubber bullets are fired into crowds of informed consenters, and extreme forms of violence are unleashed against elderly protesters – acts of barbarity that have enraged the citizenry. Melbourne in particular has lost all semblance of checks and balances, with storm troopers being unleashed on the population, in harrowing scenes reminiscent of the Wehrmacht’s storming of Prague. (Granted, without the live rounds).

    Convinced that anyone who questions the veracity of the liberal media and the public health agencies is a “conspiracy theorist” (really a euphemism for “mentally ill”), neoliberals have already crossed the Rubicon and taken up the truncheon of authoritarianism. Undoubtedly, the official Covid narrative is deranged. Yet is it any more inane than “Trump’s white supremacist insurrection,” “Russia invaded Ukraine,” “the Russians hacked the election,” “Trump is Putin’s puppet,” and NATO was compelled to bomb Libya to smithereens “to save Benghazi?”

    Trapped in a vortex of amnesia and unreason, the neoliberal has been hoodwinked into believing that whatever the medical mullahs say is “the science;” and whatever the liberal media says is incontrovertible, irrefutable, and infallible; i.e., “reality.” Fauci’s contradictory statements, particularly with regard to the virulence of COVID-19 and his stance on masks, fail to diminish their fervor as they cannot even remember what they had for breakfast, let alone the tens of thousands of Americans killed by Vioxx or the over 400,000 Americans that lost their lives to the opioid epidemic.

    The liberals of the 1960s, who genuinely believed in the Nuremberg Code, would have regarded the Branch Covidians with contempt. What a pity that the ranks of these medical brownshirts are dominated largely by those who once idolized the likes of Bobby Kennedy and John F. Kennedy, yet now wallow in a pitiable state of moral and intellectual bankruptcy. It is true that conservative publications, such as The Washington Post, The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal are parroting similar propaganda with regard to Covid. However, as evidenced by Tucker Carlson’s show, the conservative media no longer speaks with one voice. Moreover, millions of conservatives no longer believe in the infallibility of the conservative media as liberals continue to believe in the infallibility of the liberal media.

    Ultimately, the Branch Covidians are the offspring of a union between a corporatized health care system that has grown increasingly hostile to informed consent, and a liberal class that stopped thinking when Bill Clinton was inaugurated and has come to regard senior officials in the liberal media and the public health agencies as gods. The mass psychosis of the Branch Covidians is inextricably linked with the mass psychosis of neoliberalism. Without the latter the former would have about as much societal impact as the Hare Krishnas.

    The Nazis divided humanity into the subhumans (Jews, Roma, political prisoners, and Slavs); the humans (allied European fascists and the Japanese); and the supermen (the Germans, or Aryans). For quite some time now, the American health care system has been mired in a multi-tier system which divides patients up into similar categories. In light of this boorishness, teaching hospitals have long been instructing trainees that care is to be doled out depending on what kind of insurance plan patients have. Privileged patients are granted the right to choose their own doctor while the less fortunate are confined to narrow networks. Humans are permitted to meet with an attending physician while the Untermenschen are sent to resident clinics. Unbeknownst to Nazi doctors, both past and present, there is no bioethics on-off switch. In what was foundational to the Blitzkrieg but could also explain their increasingly deranged decision making, much of the German military during World War II was regularly taking Pervitin, the predecessor to crystal meth, and doing so with the support of their own doctors.

    As the forces of darkness become increasingly desperate, liberals drown in an ocean of madness and sociopathy. Hypnotized by an oligarchy they have deified, while believing that they are still marching with Martin Luther King singing “Kumbaya My Lord” and “We Shall Overcome,” this faux-left movement bears a closer resemblance to the Democratic Party of the 1860s than the Democratic Party of the 1960s. Indeed, if the Branch Covidians succeed in destroying the citadel of informed consent, only one form of government will reign in the United States: slavery.

    The post The Branch Covidians are Waging War on Humanity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Racial Justice Vs. The Israel Lobby: When Being Pro-Palestine Becomes the New Normal  

    There is an unmistakable shift in American politics regarding Palestine and Israel, a change that is inspired by the way in which many Americans, especially the youth, view the Palestinian struggle and the Israeli occupation. While this shift is yet to translate into tangibly diminishing Israel’s stronghold over the US Congress, it promises to be of great consequence in the coming years.

    Recent events at the US House of Representatives clearly demonstrate this unprecedented reality. On September 21, Democratic lawmakers successfully rejected a caveat that proposes to give Israel $1 billion in military funding as part of a broader spending bill, after objections from several progressive Congress members. The money was specifically destined to fund the purchase of new batteries and interceptors for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.

    Two days later, the funding of the Iron Dome was reintroduced and, this time, it has successfully, and overwhelmingly, passed with a vote of 420 to 9, despite passionate pleas by Palestinian-American Representative, Rashida Tlaib.

    In the second vote, only eight Democrats opposed the measure. The ninth opposing vote was cast by a member of the Republican party, Thomas Massie of Kentucky.

    Though she was one of the voices that blocked the funding measure on September 21, Democratic Representative, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, switched her vote at the very last minute to “present”, creating confusion and generating anger among her supporters.

    As for Massie, his defiance of the Republican consensus generated him the title of “Antisemite of the Week” by a notorious pro-Israel organization called ‘Stop Antisemitism’.

    Despite the outcome of the tussle, the fact that such an episode has even taken place in Congress was a historic event requiring much reflection. It means that speaking out against the Israeli occupation of Palestine is no longer taboo among elected US politicians.

    Once upon a time, speaking out against Israel in Congress generated a massive and well-organized backlash from the pro-Israeli lobby, especially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), that, in the past, ended promising political careers, even those of veteran politicians. A combination of media smear tactics, support of rivals and outright threats often sealed the fate of the few dissenting Congress members.

    While AIPAC and its sister organizations continue to follow the same old tactic, the overall strategy is hardly as effective as it once was. Members of the Squad, young Representatives who often speak out against Israel and in support of Palestine, were introduced to the 2019 Congress. With a few exceptions, they remained largely consistent in their position in support of Palestinian rights and, despite intense efforts by the Israeli lobby, they were all reelected in 2020. The historic lesson here is that being critical of Israel in the US Congress is no longer a guarantor of a decisive electoral defeat; on the contrary, in some instances, it is quite the opposite.

    The fact that 420 members of the House voted to provide Israel with additional funds – to be added to the annual funds of $3.8 billion – reflects the same unfortunate reality of old, that, thanks to the relentless biased corporate media coverage, most American constituencies continue to support Israel.

    However, the loosening grip of the lobby over the US Congress offers unique opportunities for the pro-Palestinian constituencies to finally place pressure on their Representatives, demanding accountability and balance. These opportunities are not only created by new, youthful voices in America’s democratic institutions, but by the rapidly shifting public opinion, as well.

    For decades, the vast majority of Americans supported Israel. The reasons behind this support varied, depending on the political framing as communicated by US officials and media. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, Tel Aviv was viewed as a stalwart ally of Washington against Communism. In later years, new narratives were fabricated to maintain Israel’s positive image in the eyes of ordinary Americans. The US so-called ‘war on terror’, declared in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, for example, positioned Israel as an American ally against ‘Islamic extremism’, painting resisting Palestinians as ‘terrorists’, thus giving the Israeli occupation of Palestine a moral facade.

    However, new factors have destabilized this paradigm. One is the fact that support for Israel has become a divisive issue in the US’ increasingly tumultuous and combative politics, where most Republicans support Israel and most Democrats don’t.

    Moreover, as racial justice has grown to become one of the most defining and emotive subjects in American politics, many Americans began seeing the Palestinian struggle against the Israeli occupation from the prism of millions of Americans’ own fight for racial equality. The fact that the social media hashtag #PalestinianLivesMatter continues to trend daily alongside the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter speaks of a success story where communal solidarity and intersectionality have prevailed over selfish politics, where only money matters.

    Millions of young Americans now see the struggle in Palestine as integral to the anti-racist fight in America; no amount of pro-Israeli lobbying in Congress can possibly shift this unmistakable trend. There are plenty of numbers that attest to these claims. One of many examples is the University of Maryland’s public opinion poll in July, which showed that more than half of polled Americans disapproved of President Joe Biden’s handling of the Israeli war on Gaza in May 2021, believing that he could have done more to stop the Israeli aggression.

    Of course, courageous US politicians dared to speak out against Israel in the past. However, there is a marked difference between previous generations and the current one. In American politics today, there are politicians who are elected because of their strong stance for Palestine and, by deviating from their election promises, they risk the ire of the growing pro-Palestine constituency throughout the country. This changing reality is finally making it possible to nurture and sustain pro-Palestinian presence in US Congress.

    In other words, speaking out for Palestine in America is no longer a charitable and rare occurrence. As the future will surely reveal, it is the “politically correct” thing to do.

    The post Racial Justice Vs. The Israel Lobby: When Being Pro-Palestine Becomes the New Normal   first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • McConnell Says He’ll Allow Vote on Raising Debt Ceiling Through December

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell addresses reporters following a weekly Republican policy luncheon at the U.S. Capitol on October 5, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Senate Republicans will allow a vote on raising the debt ceiling, averting a crisis that would have seen the United States government defaulting on its debt obligations for the first time in its history.

    Although Republicans have blocked every effort to raise the debt ceiling since last month — and though much of the debt was incurred due to deficit spending under former President Donald Trump — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Kentucky) statement announcing his party’s decision to agree to raise the debt ceiling sought to blame Democrats for the crisis.

    “To protect the American people from a near-term Democrat-created crisis, we will also allow Democrats to use normal procedures to pass an emergency debt limit extension at a fixed dollar amount to cover current spending levels into December,” McConnell said.

    Had the debt ceiling not been raised by a mid-October deadline, the U.S. government would have defaulted on its debts, which economists have warned would likely result in a recession.

    Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen expressed similar concerns about the economy, saying in an interview on CNBC on Tuesday that it would be “catastrophic to not pay the government’s bills, for us to be in a position where we lacked the resources to pay the government’s bills.”

    “I fully expect it would cause a recession as well,” Yellen added.

    The deal, if agreed upon by Democratic lawmakers, would end the standoff to raise the debt ceiling that has spanned the past month. But the victory would only last a couple of months, and the debate surrounding raising the debt ceiling would resume in December.

    McConnell’s announcement came after his previous offer to expedite the reconciliation process as means of staving off the debt crisis. But according to CNN’s Manu Raju, the Senate Minority Leader’s shift was inspired in part by Democrats’ threat to change filibuster rules in order to raise the debt ceiling, as well as pressure placed on centrist Democrats to acquiesce.

    “McConnell told his colleagues he’s concerned about pressure on [West Virginia Sen. Joe] Manchin and [Arizona Sen. Kyrsten] Sinema to gut filibuster in order to raise debt ceiling, I’m told,” Raju wrote in a tweet.

    Although Manchin said earlier on Wednesday that he was opposed to removing the Senate filibuster as a strategy to raise the debt limit, President Joe Biden endorsed a plan to do so, telling reporters yesterday that there was a “real possibility” of that taking place.

    The debate around ending the filibuster to raise the debt limit may come up when the debt ceiling is brought up again in December. It’s also possible that Democrats may try to end the need for Congress to raise the debt ceiling at all, and instead advocate for the action to be automatic.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Republicans Lie That It’s Democrats’ — Not Trump’s — Debts That Need to Be Paid

    Sen. Ted Cruz speaks during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on September 14, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    As Democrats scramble to raise the debt ceiling before the U.S. defaults, Republicans like Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) have been misleading the public about who incurred the debts in the first place. More and more transparently, the GOP is revealing that their goal is to cause financial disaster — and to blame it on Democrats.

    Republicans are planning to block yet another Democratic attempt to raise the debt ceiling on Wednesday. Over the past few weeks, they’ve left Democrats with few options for avoiding a default, which has led President Joe Biden to suggest that his party’s leaders carve out a filibuster exception just for the debt limit.

    Even though a debt default could spell financial chaos for the country, potentially sapping trillions of dollars of household wealth from American families, Republicans have refused to budge — and even though the debts that need to be paid were incurred during the Trump administration, they are claiming the debt is the Democrats’ fault for wanting to pass their widely popular social and climate spending plan.

    “They basically want us to be aiders and abettors to their reckless spending and tax policies, and we just aren’t going to do it,” Cornyn told The Washington Post this week.

    The debt ceiling has nothing to do with the Democratic agenda and everything to do with Donald Trump’s policies — particularly the 2017 tax reform plan, in which Republicans gifted massive tax breaks to corporations and the rich with no plan to fill in the deficit that would create. Trump built up nearly $8 trillion in debt over just four years, which economists say will take years to pay off.

    Cruz also lied about the Democrats’ responsibility for the debt last month on Fox, claiming that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) “doesn’t want to raise the debt ceiling using Democrats because he wants to rack up trillions in new spending, trillions in new taxes, and he wants to shift political blame…. He wants to get 10 Republicans to vote for the Democrats’ massively irresponsible spending,” in order to bypass the filibuster on the debt ceiling. The Texas senator has been dead set on blocking attempts to raise the debt ceiling over the past few weeks, hinging his opposition on this misleading claim.

    The debt ceiling raise has nothing to do with the Democrats’ reconciliation bill, which is fully funded by moderate tax increases on corporations and the wealthy. However, the GOP is trying its hardest to tie the two things together.

    Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and other Republican lawmakers have been demanding that Democrats raise the debt ceiling through the reconciliation bill, in aims of weakening or sinking the reconciliation bill altogether. Democrats have refused to pass the debt ceiling through reconciliation, saying that it would take too long to avoid a default and that there are other options for resolving the issue.

    Republicans have yet to stray from this strategy, even as the default date grows closer– and they’ve shown callous indifference to the fact that their obstruction has the potential to spell economic disaster. If a debt default happens because of their demands, “then too bad,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-North Dakota) told The Washington Post. “It’s just really, really unfortunate that [Democrats are] that irresponsible.”

    The GOP is also reluctant to support a filibuster carveout for the debt ceiling. McConnell said that he “can’t imagine” doing that if he were in charge. After Biden suggested the filibuster carveout on Wednesday, McConnell told Senate Republicans that he is planning to offer a temporary debt ceiling extension or an expedited reconciliation process instead.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Slams GOP For Obstructing Debt Limit in Wake of “Reckless” Trump Agenda

    President Joe Biden addresses the media after a meeting of the House Democratic Caucus on the infrastructure bill in the U.S. Capitol on October 1, 2021.

    On Monday, President Joe Biden slammed Republicans for obstructing attempts to prevent the financial disaster that would be caused by a U.S. debt default, calling their interference “disgraceful.” For weeks, Republicans have been insistent on causing a default by refusing to raise the debt ceiling.

    “Let’s be clear. Not only are Republicans refusing to do their job, but they’re threatening to use their power to prevent us from doing our job, saving the economy from a catastrophic event. I think quite frankly it’s hypocritical, dangerous and disgraceful,” said Biden. “Their obstruction and irresponsibility knows absolutely no bounds, especially as we’re clawing our way out of this pandemic.”

    Pointing out that Republican senators have been threatening to use the filibuster to block the debt ceiling raise, he urged GOP lawmakers to “get out of the way” if they want Democrats to fix the problem themselves. Yet Republicans are willfully obstructing nearly every path that Democrats could take to raise the debt ceiling with Democratic votes alone.

    Biden pointed out that it isn’t about his current agenda, but about paying off existing debts. “Raising the debt limit comes down to paying what we already owe,” he said. “It starts with a simple truth: the United States is a nation that has paid its bills and always has.”

    The president continued to say that previous debt limit raises have been a bipartisan effort because both parties recognized the importance of the U.S. paying its debts. “The reason we have to raise the debt limit is in part because of the reckless tax and spending policies under the previous [Donald] Trump administration. In four years, they incurred nearly $8 trillion — in four years, $8 trillion in additional debt,” he said. “That’s more than a quarter of the entire debt incurred now outstanding after more than 200 years.”

    Over the course of Trump’s presidency, Republicans voted to raise the debt limit three times. Now, the U.S. faces a crisis if the debt limit isn’t raised before the U.S. runs out of money to pay for its obligations, which Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says could come in just two weeks. Every day until the debt limit is raised, the so-called “X date” — the day the U.S. could default — grows closer.

    Economists warn that if Congress remains in deadlock and the U.S. defaults on its debts, the resulting economic downturn could be catastrophic, similar to that of the Great Recession in 2008. According to analysis by Moody’s Analytics, six million jobs could be lost and American families could have $15 trillion of their collective wealth yanked out from under them.

    The longer Republicans block Democrats from raising the debt ceiling leading up to a default, the more unstable the economy gets, Biden pointed out. Last week, investors began preparing for the possibility of a default, resulting in a market plunge.

    “As soon as this week, your savings and your pocketbook could be directly impacted by this Republican stunt,” the president said. “Republicans say they will not do their part to avoid this needless calamity. So be it. But they need to stop playing Russian roulette with the U.S. economy.”

    Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) has only doubled down on his party’s debt limit obstruction in recent days, even as the economy roils due to the possibility of a debt default.

    In a bizarre letter to Biden on Monday, he requested that the president ask Democrats to avoid a debt default. The minority leader continues to pin the blame on Democrats — even though he could change his mind about obstructing raising the debt limit at any time, preventing what could become a dire economic crisis.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Fox News Host Confronts GOP Senator for Backing Child Tax Credit Under Trump But Not Biden

    By Jason Lemon 

    Fox News anchor Chris Wallace confronted Senator John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, over his support for expanding child tax credits under former President Donald Trump while he now opposes Democrats’ efforts that would expand them even further under President Joe Biden.

    The 2017 Republican tax cuts doubled the existing child tax credits. Democrats then temporarily increased child tax credits further under the American Rescue Plan approved in March, and began sending out the payments monthly. Through the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation proposal, these increased tax credits would be extended.

    While Barrasso supported the child tax credits as part of Trump’s signature tax cut legislation, the GOP senator now opposes the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill that would improve them further. Wallace pressed Barrasso on the issue during a Sunday interview on Fox News Sunday.

    “As part of the Trump tax cuts in 2017, you voted to increase the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000. Now, as part of this bill, the Democrats would extend that to 2025 at a higher level,” Wallace explained. “And the fact is that your state of Wyoming is one of the states that benefits most from the increase in the child tax credit. Why oppose that?”

    Barrasso responded by pointing to his concerns about the broader $3.5 trillion package. The Wyoming Republican called it “a massive bill.”

    Wallace then interjected. “Forgive me sir, but I’m asking about this specific part of the bill. I understand there are parts that you don’t like. For instance—I guess part of the question is, could you have worked with them on this child tax credit? Which you voted for in 2017, that’s one of the things that you’re voting against now. Why oppose that specific program?”

    The GOP senator said that lawmakers have to “look at the entire bill and say if you’re for the bill or you’re not.” The Wyoming lawmaker went on to complain that Democratic lawmakers have not been “coming to talk to Republicans on any of these things.”

    Later in the interview, Wallace pressed Barrasso over the provision to expanded childcare and fund universal pre-kindergarten through the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package: “In the state of Wyoming, less than a quarter of children [ages] three to four, which is who would be covered in the bill, are enrolled in publicly funded preschool—less than a quarter. Wouldn’t a lot of Wyoming families benefit from universal pre-k?”

    Barrasso admitted that “there are a number of things that will help the people of Wyoming” in the bill. But he insisted that “overall, Joe Biden’s policies have been hurting the people of Wyoming.”

    Newsweek reached out to Barrasso’s press representatives for further comment but did not immediately receive a response.

    The $3.5 trillion reconciliation package proposed by the White House and Democratic leaders would provide funding for universal pre-kindergarten, extend the popular child tax credits, make two years of community college free for all Americans, expand medicare access, work to lower the cost of prescriptions drugs and address climate change, among other priorities. But Republicans in Congress unanimously oppose the Democratic legislation.

    Democrats turned to the budget reconciliation process when it became apparent that they would not receive any GOP support for the bill. Due to the Senate‘s legislative filibuster rule, most legislation requires at least 60 votes to pass in the upper chamber of Congress. With an evenly split Senate—50 to 50—Democrats turned to the budget reconciliation process, which allows for passage with a slim majority. Vice President Kamala Harris, the president of the Senate, can cast the final decision on tied votes.

    But moderate Democratic Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia have expressed opposition to the high price tag of the reconciliation bill—leaving its passage in doubt. Manchin said last week that he’d be supportive of a substantially smaller $1.5 trillion reconciliation bill and President Joe Biden later reportedly told lawmakers that the final package may be closer to $1.9 trillion or $2.2 trillion.

    Original article: https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-host-confronts-gop-senator-backing-child-tax-credit-under-trump-not-biden-1635107

    The post Fox News Host Confronts GOP Senator for Backing Child Tax Credit Under Trump But Not Biden appeared first on Basic Income Today.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Was the Long March a Dead End? An Exchange on Radicals and the University

    In the 1960s, young radicals saw the university as an ideal site for agitating and organizing. What changed?

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Most Americans Want Dems in Charge of Congress Next Year, Polling Data Shows

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and President Joe Biden speak briefly to reporters as they arrive at the U.S. Capitol for a Senate Democratic luncheon on July 14, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    A number of new polls out this week seem to suggest good news for Democrats in the upcoming 2022 midterms — and troubling news for Republicans (particularly former President Donald Trump) when it comes to the next presidential election.

    Such numbers may not hold steady in the years or even months ahead. But having an understanding of what the data says now gives political parties and candidates for office a better sense of where things are going, and how to adjust strategy if necessary.

    For Democrats, things seem to be going in the right direction.

    In the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist National Poll published on Thursday, respondents were asked to share which political party they would most likely support if the 2022 midterm races were being held today. Democrats obtained a plurality of support, with 46 percent of registered voters saying they’d be more likely to back a candidate from that party for their congressional district races, versus just 38 percent who said they’d back a Republican candidate.

    While there’s still a little more than a year left before Election Day 2022, early polling is often indicative of the direction elections may be headed. In 2017, after an Economist/YouGov poll showed that voters preferred Democrats to Republicans by six points, Democrats went on to win the House elections by around eight points.

    It’s less clear what voters want when it comes to presidential elections. Biden has the approval of 45 percent of registered voters who participated in the poll, while 46 percent said they disapprove — figures that represent a statistical tie. His approval rating is up two points when compared to the poll’s findings earlier this month. During that time, his disapproval rating has diminished by five points.

    These numbers don’t indicate how Biden would perform in a 2024 presidential race if he decides to run for a second term. However, they do show that he would have a reasonable chance of winning, particularly if Trump, his rival in the 2020 race, decides to run again.

    Last month, polling from Quinnipiac University found that only 32 percent of respondents felt it would be a “good” thing if Trump ran again, while 60 percent said it would be “bad” for the country. Coupled with those results, the numbers from the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll suggest that if Biden does run again, with Trump as his GOP opponent, he has a good shot at reelection.

    Of course, that’s assuming that Trump remains the frontrunner — and the eventual nominee — for the Republican Party. An additional poll that was released this week, conducted by the Super PAC run by Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton, shows that the former president may be losing ground to another potential GOP candidate.

    Within that poll, 26.2 percent of respondents said that if the Republican primary for president in 2024 were held today they would back Trump, while 25.2 percent said they would support Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. The poll has a 3.1 percent margin of error, which means that at the moment, the two potential candidates for president are tied within a hypothetical Republican primary.

    Despite DeSantis’s potential as a future GOP nominee, this doesn’t necessarily spell out good news for the Republican Party. Polling conducted in August shows that DeSantis is viewed unfavorably by 36 percent of the voting public, while only 29 percent see him in a positive light. 35 percent said they didn’t know enough about him to form an opinion.

    The numbers from all of these polls — from the congressional races to the presidency — are likely to fluctuate between now and when elections are held. But they do indicate the current trajectory of voters’ opinions of potential candidates, and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • GOP Threatens Economic Disaster by Refusing to Raise Debt Limit Before Shutdown

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is seen during a senate vote in the U.S. Capitol on September 22, 2021.

    On Monday, Senate Republicans voted against raising the U.S.’s debt limit, rejecting a measure that would have avoided a government shutdown and provided billions for disaster aid and Afghan refugees. If Congress continues its deadlock, economists project that the looming shutdown and debt default could lead to an economic crash.

    Though some Republicans had considered voting for the debt limit raise to help the U.S. avoid a default, ultimately, they all aligned against the measure. If Democrats can’t work out a funding solution by Thursday, the government will shut down Friday morning in the midst of the pandemic. Economists warn that even a short shutdown could upend global markets, creating spiked interest rates on Treasury bonds in the long term.

    Further, if the U.S. defaults on its debts, a situation which Republicans have been threatening to create, the resulting economic downturn could be disastrous and even trigger a recession if left unchecked for long enough. Economists estimate that the “X date” — the day that the government would run out of funding and be forced to choose between defaulting on its debts or paying out crucial social programs — could come as early as mid-October.

    Even if a default never happens, the possibility of it happening could alarm markets just as the economy is making a nascent recovery from the pandemic. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned Democratic leaders that a default, which would be unprecedented, must be avoided.

    Democrats now have limited options when it comes to avoiding a shutdown. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) has said that putting the debt ceiling hike into the reconciliation bill, which can pass via a simple majority in the Senate, is a “non-starter.” Some sources say the process would take at least 10 days, and Durbin has claimed it could eat up weeks.

    Democrats could also present the debt ceiling as a standalone bill to avoid a shutdown, in which case Republicans would have to either support it or choose not to filibuster it, though both options are unlikely. Some experts say that the Biden administration could take steps to nullify the debt ceiling entirely — a nuclear option that some economic experts favor. Still, the options for Democrats are sparse, and with the uncertainty of the “X date,” the risk of defaulting grows closer each day.

    Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) is leading his caucus in playing political brinkmanship over the debt limit, at once saying that he opposes a debt default while still imploring Republicans to oppose the measure that would prevent one anyway.

    “It’s an unhinged position to take,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York). “There is no scenario in God’s green earth where it should be worth risking millions of jobs, trillions in household wealth, people’s Social Security checks, veterans’ benefits and another recession just to score short-term, meaningless political points.”

    Though there are few apparent and immediate benefits to McConnell’s dangerous debt limit threat — other than, perhaps, trying to block the reconciliation bill — former President Donald Trump noted that the GOP would be “foolish” to not use the debt ceiling as a tool to get ahead. “The only powerful tool that Republicans have to negotiate with is the Debt Ceiling, and they would be both foolish and unpatriotic not to use it now,” Trump said.

    On this, Trump isn’t entirely wrong — refusing to raise the debt ceiling gives Republicans the power to manipulate Democrats and spout whatever message they want about Democratic leadership, especially when it comes to policies that they describe as Democrats’ “tax-and-spend” agenda.

    But this game is potentially destructive, and political writers and lawmakers have noted that the recklessness on display by Republicans — just so they can hold more tools to attack Democrats — is both cynical and shameless.

    “It’s time to call the Republicans out over this: Are you kidding me on the debt ceiling?” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) on MSNBC last week. “What are we trying to raise the debt ceiling for now? To cover the debts that were incurred during the Trump administration. And the Republicans want to turn around and play political games with that? They want to threaten to blow up our entire economy — and actually, the world economy — over that?”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • RNC Official Reveals GOP Plan to Ramp Up Election Lawsuits in 2022

    Election challengers demand to enter to observe the absentee ballots counting but were dined after the room reached capacity during the 2020 general election in Detroit, Michigan, on November 4, 2020.

    In Michigan on Friday, a top Republican National Committee (RNC) official informed Republican leaders of the party’s plan to continue destabilizing elections with lawsuits and other efforts in the upcoming midterm elections.

    As first reported by the Detroit Free Press, Josh Findlay, the election integrity director for the RNC, said that the GOP is planning to massively increase the use of poll watchers, who Republicans have been empowering through state-level bills. The party is also planning to majorly step up litigation efforts, like Donald Trump attempted to do in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

    At the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference in Michigan, Findlay said that the GOP failed in 2020 by not preparing litigation ahead of time. By the time Trump and his campaign filed lawsuits on Election Day, it was too late to affect the results, he said.

    Findlay also said that the GOP strategy of unleashing a flood of Republican poll watchers on ballot counting locations, like the party did in Detroit, caused chaos that was later used against them in court. But the GOP is readying itself for the next election: In 2022, “when we go into Election Day, we’ll know exactly what to look for,” he said.

    In a backlash to the 2020 election, Republicans have been working to expand the powers of partisan poll watchers and enact voter suppression laws across the country. Poll watchers sent on behalf of parties or candidates typically face strict rules on how close they can get to polling locations and what parts of the voting process they can observe or access.

    Bills by GOP legislators like one recently passed in Texas empower such partisan figures; the Texas law makes it a misdemeanor for an election official to reject a poll watcher and allows poll watchers to sue election officials who obstruct them. Though the law requires them to sign an oath to not harass voters, voting experts say that expanding partisan poll watchers’ access across the country could lead to harassment and intimidation.

    “It is telling that after the most secure and successful election in modern times, the GOP continues its attempt to undermine the rights of voters,” Sylvia Albert, Director of Voting and Elections at Common Cause, told Truthout. “The GOP has a long history of using poll watchers to intimidate voters, and now are attempting to protect this form of intimidation by tying the hands of election officials.”

    Poll watchers were an important strategy for Trump in 2020, with the then-president asking the Proud Boys, a far right extremist group, to “stand back and stand by.” He also encouraged people to “go into the polls and watch very carefully” during the election.

    The election lawsuits are another looming threat. Though Republicans lost all of the lawsuits they filed over the 2020 election, the GOP is making moves to take control of election boards and manipulate election laws that could help their chances. In Georgia, where Republicans recently passed a massive voter suppression bill, GOP lawmakers have been taking steps to take over the election board in Fulton County, where Atlanta is located.

    The RNC is working to appoint election integrity directors, Findlay said, and has already installed them in nine states. Others could be appointed soon ahead of the 2022 election. It’s unclear what these RNC officials would be doing, but it’s likely that they would be in tune with efforts to advance Republican voter suppression and election destabilization across the country.

    Voting rights advocates are filing lawsuit after lawsuit to combat overly partisan gerrymandering efforts, which Republicans disproportionately wield. But election experts and advocates say that lawsuits aren’t enough.

    “The optimal way to go is for Congress to pass HR1,” Marc Elias, an elections and voting rights lawyer and founder of Democracy Docket, told the Associated Press in May. “We turn to the courts not as our first choice but as our last.”

    Indeed, voting rights advocates have aligned themselves behind federal voting rights legislation, including H.R. 1, or the For the People Act, and more recently, the Freedom to Vote Act, a modified version of the Democrats’ marquee bill. But it faces Republican opposition and has exceedingly slim chances of passing the 60-vote filibuster rule in the Senate.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • SCOTUS Asked to Find Texas Abortion Ban Unconstitutional as GOP States Copy Bill

    An abortion rights activist holds a sign in support of Planned Parenthood at a rally at the Texas State Capitol on September 11, 2021 in Austin, Texas.

    While Republican lawmakers in several states are working to replicate an abortion ban recently enacted in Texas, healthcare providers and reproductive rights advocates on Thursday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider blocking the “patently unconstitutional” measure.

    “For 23 days, we’ve been forced to deny essential abortion care for the vast majority of patients who come to us,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, president and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health and Whole Woman’s Health Alliance, in a statement about the new request (pdf).

    “Most of those we’ve turned away told us they would not be able to make it out of Texas for care,” she said. “I don’t know what happened to these patients after they left our clinics, but I can’t stop thinking about them. Forcing our staff to tell patients ‘no’ day after day is cruel. This chaos must come to an end, and that is why we are going back to the Supreme Court today.”

    Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), also emphasized the urgent need for an intervention to ensure access to essential healthcare.

    “Planned Parenthood call centers have become crisis hotlines and health center staff have become crisis counselors,” said the PPFA leader, whose group is representing Texas healthcare providers, abortion funds, and other plaintiffs alongside the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), the Lawyering Project, the national ACLU, the ACLU of Texas, and Morrison & Foerster LLP.

    “For half a century, the Supreme Court has upheld the fundamental right to end a pregnancy. But for the past three weeks, five justices have shrugged their shoulders while Texas politicians do an end run around the Constitution and impose devastating harm on countless Texans, especially people of color,” said Julia Kaye, a staff attorney at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project. “It is past time for the Supreme Court to step in and right this grave injustice.”

    The high court allowed Texas’ Senate Bill 8 to take effect earlier this month in a 5-4 ruling for which Chief Justice John Roberts joined the three liberals. Though some critics say that move effectively overturned Roe v. Wade — the 1973 case that affirmed the right to abortion — the justices did not consider the constitutionality of the ban in their decision.

    S.B. 8 not only bans abortion after six weeks — before many people know they are pregnant — without exceptions for rape or incest, it also empowers anti-choice vigilantes to enforce the law with the offer of a $10,000 “bounty,” which the U.S. Department of Justice has noted is part of an “unprecedented scheme” to make the law harder to challenge in court.

    Thursday’s filing points out that since the justices’ decision to refrain from blocking the law and let it move through the judicial system, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit Circuit has indicated that its position is “under circuit precedent, federal courts are powerless to preemptively block enforcement of a privately enforced state-law prohibition.”

    The filing further notes that “although the 5th Circuit expedited the appeal, it will not hold argument until December at the earliest,” and asserts quicker action is needed, given that S.B. 8 is already interfering with the healthcare and rights of Texans and residents of neighboring states, whose clinics have seen an increase in demand since the law took effect.

    As CRR president and CEO Nancy Northup put it: “We’re asking the Supreme Court for this expedited appeal because the 5th Circuit has done nothing to change the dire circumstances on the ground in Texas. We need this case to move as quickly as possible.”

    The filing highlights that “already, legislators in other states are taking notice and vowing to adopt copycat laws,” and says there is no “reason to think abortion is the only constitutional right that will be targeted,” echoing widespread warnings about other fundamental rights.

    HuffPost reported that House Bill 167, introduced Wednesday by Florida Rep. Webster Barnaby (R-27), would go even further than S.B. 8 — expanding the window of time in which lawsuits by private citizens could be brought against anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion beyond the six-week limit “from four years under the Texas law to six years in the Sunshine State.”

    At least two cases have already kicked off under Texas’ law; they both target Dr. Alan Braid, a longtime abortion provider in San Antonio who over the weekend publicly admitted to violating S.B. 8, in hopes that the disclosure would help overturn the state’s new ban.

    The threat to reproductive rights posed by the Texas law, copycat legislation, and an upcoming Supreme Court case — a challenge to a Mississippi abortion ban that experts warn could reverse Roe — have collectively elevated calls for the Democrat-controlled Congress to take action.

    Earlier this month, House Speaker Nancy Pelsoi (D-Calif.) announced the chamber will soon vote on the Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA), legislation to codify Roe that is broadly backed by rights advocates.

    The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and 60 other organizations on Thursday sent a letter to lawmakers detailing the devastating impacts of state-level attacks on abortion rights like S.B. 8 and urging them to pass WHPA (H.R. 3755/S. 1975).

    “The Women’s Health Protection Act is an important step in ending these harmful laws,” the groups argued, “and promoting the health, economic security, and well-being of those whom we have forced through law and policy to live at the margins.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Report: McConnell’s Refusal to Raise Debt Ceiling Could Cost 6 Million Jobs

    Mitch McConnell

    If Republicans make good on their threats to allow the U.S. to default on loan payments after refusing to raise the debt ceiling, economists warn in no uncertain terms that a subsequent economic downturn could be disastrous and “cataclysmic” if Congress reaches a debt impasse.

    A new analysis by Moody’s Analytics found that if Republicans shoot down an attempt to raise the debt ceiling and lawmakers enter an extended period in which they can’t agree on how to avert a government shutdown, it could trigger economic conditions similar to the Great Recession in 2008.

    Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi and assistant director Bernard Yaros wrote that this scenario would lead to the loss of nearly 6 million jobs in the U.S. It would also cause unemployment to surge from about 5 percent to 9 percent and household wealth to plummet by $15 trillion. Even after the government reopened, it would have permanent consequences like spiking mortgage and other borrowing rates, they warn in the report.

    “This economic scenario is cataclysmic,” Yaros and Zandi said. “[T]he downturn would be comparable to that suffered during the financial crisis.”

    Even a short government shutdown could “upend” global markets and the economy, which is still fragile from the pandemic — and even if the debt default and shutdown are swiftly resolved, the resulting higher interest rates on Treasury bonds would still have lasting, generational effects, Yaros and Zandi wrote.

    The report’s authors are critical of the entire process to raise the debt limit. “The original intent of the debt limit was to be a forcing mechanism on lawmakers to remain fiscally disciplined. It has failed at this,” the report reads. “Instead, it has become highly disruptive to the fiscal process.”

    Currently, if lawmakers fail to raise the debt limit, the Treasury Department wouldn’t be able to pay debts. The agency would be forced to either default on the debts, which Moody’s estimates would come due around October 20, or pay the $20 billion it owes that day to Social Security recipients. If the shutdown continued further, the Treasury would be forced to make other similar decisions.

    Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has also warned of high stakes if the U.S. has to default, which she says would be unprecedented. “Doing so would likely precipitate a historic financial crisis that would compound the damage of the continuing public health emergency,” she wrote Sunday.

    The shutdown and default is an easily avoidable scenario in theory. Congress could simply come together and raise the debt ceiling, as it has done many times before, often under Republican leadership. In fact, under Donald Trump, Republicans added nearly $8 trillion to the national debt, the third largest addition to the national debt of any president.

    However, now that a Democrat is in charge, Republicans have transformed back into deficit hawks. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) is saying that he opposes allowing the U.S. to default, but is aligning Republicans to refuse to vote to raise the debt ceiling — which is essentially voting to allow the U.S. to default.

    Bizarrely, McConnell pins the blame for this on Democrats. But Democrats, who have not indicated that they want a default to happen, have been scrambling to prevent that scenario. Only the GOP has said that they will vote to allow a default.

    “McConnell seemingly could not care less” about creating financial chaos, wrote Truthout’s William Rivers Pitt. “His interest appears entirely political and utterly without shame: He wants his people to go into the 2022 midterms with ‘tax-and-spend liberals’ on every tongue. The same Republicans who aided the Trump administration’s wild financial giveaways to corporations and the wealthy now intend to use the economy itself against President Biden’s legislative attempt to address climate change and expand the social safety net, and all as a means of regaining the majority.”

    If Republicans follow through with this plan, it would not be their first time throwing the country into financial chaos for political gain and obstruction. Under President Barack Obama, they caused major fights over the debt limit in 2011 and again in 2013, which created long-term negative consequences for the economy, the report’s authors noted.

    “[T]he heightened uncertainty at the time reduced business investment and hiring and weighed heavily on GDP growth. If not for this uncertainty, by mid-2015, real GDP would have been $180 billion, or more than 1%, higher; there would have been 1.2 million more jobs; and the unemployment rate would have been 0.7 percentage point lower,” wrote Yaros and Zandi. “That is, if not for the political logjams in Washington over the debt limit after the financial crisis, the post-crisis economic recovery would have been meaningfully stronger.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • GOP Senate Candidate Threatens Preemptive Lawsuits 14 Months Before Election

    Adam Laxalt

    Nevada Senate candidate Adam Laxalt, a Republican with a well-known name in the Silver State, is already stoking fears of voter fraud and vowing to file lawsuits to “try to tighten up the election” — 14 months before any actual votes are cast.

    Republican candidates around the country have ripped a page from Donald Trump’s playbook, launching spurious claims of fraud about elections that haven’t happened yet, in an apparent effort to blame potential defeats on unspecified and evidence-free claims of “irregularities.” California Republican Larry Elder, who hoped to be elected governor after the recent recall election targeting Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, launched a website claiming voter fraud days before votes were even counted. (In the event, the vote against the recall was so overwhelming Elder has stopped talking about it.) But Laxalt, who was endorsed by Trump after filing multiple lawsuits contesting Joe Biden’s narrow 2020 victory in Nevada, is breaking new ground by making such claims more than a year before a single vote is cast.

    “With me at the top of the ticket, we’re going to be able to get everybody at the table and come up with a full plan, do our best to try to secure this election, get as many observers as we can, and file lawsuits early, if there are lawsuits we can file to try to tighten up the election,” Laxalt told radio host Wayne Allyn Root in an interview last month after Root claimed that “Trump won Nevada” and said the election had been “stolen.” The comments were first flagged by Jon Ralston, editor of the Nevada Independent, and later reported by the Associated Press.

    The comments set off alarm among some Nevada Republicans, according to Ralston, who drew a comparison to failed 2010 U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle. Angle held an early polling lead over then-incumbent Sen. Harry Reid, a Democrat, until she veered sharply to the right, alienating key conservatives in the state.

    “She went on with friendly interviewers, got comfy and said damaging things,” Ralston said on Twitter. “Laxalt will only do Newsmax, OAN, Joecks TV and will keep making mistakes. That’s why GOPers here are worried.”

    Laxalt is the grandson of Paul Laxalt, a Nevada Republican legend who served both as governor and in the U.S. Senate. His biological father, as he revealed less than 10 years ago, was former Sen. Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican and close ally of Ronald Reagan, who had an extramarital relationship with Laxalt’s mother when she worked on Capitol Hill. Laxalt served one term as Nevada attorney general and ran for governor in 2018, losing to Democrat Steve Sisolak despite Trump’s endorsement. He later served as co-chair of Trump’s 2020 campaign.

    “Adam Laxalt led Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and now he’s running the same Big Lie playbook for his 2022 Senate campaign,” said Andy Orellana, a spokesperson for Nevada Democratic Victory, which is working to re-elect Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, who would be Laxalt’s opponent in the 2022 general election. “He knows he can’t win on the issues, so Laxalt is pushing frivolous preemptive lawsuits in an effort to limit Nevadans’ voting rights and potentially overturn the election when he loses.”

    Laxalt led multiple lawsuits on behalf of Trump’s campaign, leading the Las Vegas Sun editorial board to dub him the “Nevada version of Rudy Giuliani.”

    Laxalt insisted in the interview with Root that the problem with those lawsuits was not that the campaign’s failed to produce any evidence of fraud but only that that the suits were not filed in time.

    “There’s no question that, unfortunately, a lot of the lawsuits and a lot of the attention spent on Election Day operations just came too late,” he said.

    In fact, Laxalt filed his first failed challenge of the 2020 vote before Election Day, seeking to stop the count of mail-in ballots in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas and is home to three-quarters of Nevada’s population. After Trump’s defeat, Laxalt repeatedly pushed conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud, without provide any actual evidence.

    “I’m telling you, there are improper votes,” he insisted at the time. “We don’t know if it’s 2,000, 10,000 or 40,000. I believe it is in the thousands.”

    Laxalt also pushed a claim that more than 3,000 non-residents had voted by mail in the 2020 Nevada election. Trump allies filed a lawsuit over the claim — but then dropped them after it became clear that many of the ballots Laxalt described were linked to military post office boxes overseas or locations around the country where military personnel are stationed, suggesting they were legally cast by troops and their family members.

    Laxalt filed a post-election lawsuit alleging widespread voting irregularities and asking a court to overturn Biden’s victory and declare Trump the winner. A judge in Carson City, the state capital, rejected the challenge, writing that the campaign’s evidence had “little to no value” and “did not prove under any standard of proof that any illegal votes were cast and counted, or legal votes were not counted at all, for any other improper or illegal reason.” Trump’s campaign appealed the decision, arguing that the court did not take into account “expert” testimony provided by the campaign. The Nevada Supreme Court rejected that challenge, writing that the campaign failed to identify any “unsupported factual findings” in the earlier ruling.

    “Last time Laxalt (and other anti-voter allies) pushed lies like this, they lost. Again and again,” the States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan group that supports fair and secure elections, said on Twitter in response to Laxalt’s latest lawsuit threat. “The fight is so far from over. Lies about election integrity are spreading past the 2020 presidential election.”

    In fact, Biden won Nevada by more than 33,000 votes — making Laxalt’s unsupported claims about non-resident voting irrelevant — and the results were certified by the state Supreme Court. Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske launched an investigation into voter fraud allegations that found no evidence of widespread fraud or irregularities.

    “While the NVGOP raises policy concerns about the integrity of mail-in voting, automatic voter registration, and same-day voter registration, these concerns do not amount to evidentiary support for the contention that the 2020 general election was plagued by widespread voter fraud,” she wrote in a letter to the state Republican Party in April — after the party censured her for refusing to support the false claims of election fraud that have seemingly become GOP doctrine.

    But the absence of evidence has apparently done little to assuage Laxalt as the state’s Republican Party continues to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from its baseless fraud claims. Laxalt’s campaign did not respond to questions from Salon.

    In a statement to the AP, Laxalt declined to specify what kind of lawsuits he believes woiuld “tighten up the election” or to say whether he would accept the election results if he loses. But criticized the Democratic-led state legislature for passing a bill to send mail-in ballots to every registered voter.

    “Without a single Republican vote, Democrats radically changed the election rules in the final stretch of last year’s campaign and many voters lost confidence in the system as a result,” he told the outlet. “Their partisan transformation of Nevada’s system handed election officials an untested process that generated over 750,000 mail-in votes, unclean voter rolls, loose ballots and virtually no signature verification. Nevadans have a right to more transparency and voters deserve confidence in the accuracy of election results, and I will proudly fight for them.”

    Asked about the former attorney general’s argument, a spokesperson for Cegavske told Salon that the secretary of state is “not commenting on Mr. Laxalt’s concerns beyond what she has been saying all along – that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.”

    Laxalt later bragged on Twitter that his promise to attack the 2022 election in advance “seems to be triggering the media” after it was reported by Nevada outlets. “I stand by what I said on Wayne Allen Root’s [sic] show,” he said, insisting that he simply wants “free” and “secure” elections.

    “In fact, Laxalt is the one threatening to undermine secure and fair elections,” argued Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent. “Indeed, as this demonstrates, for Trumpist politicians, the refusal to commit to respecting legitimate election losses is now a badge of honor.”

    Laxalt expects to face off against Cortez Masto next November, though he still has to get past a Republican primary that is nine months away. Democrats have accused him of preemptively trying to undermine democracy.

    “Laxalt knows he can’t defend his record of pushing Trump’s interests and those of his special interest donors over hardworking Nevadans, so 14 months before the election he’s already plotting to revive the Trump playbook — threatening self-serving lawsuits in an effort to make it harder for Nevadans to vote,” Jazmin Vargas, a spokesperson for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said in a statement. “Nevadans see right through Laxalt’s corrupt and dishonest tactics and will reject him again in 2022.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden: Tilt Taxes to the Middle Class

    The bad news is that taxes in America are tilted in favor of the rich. The best news is that we could be only weeks away from a tilt in favor of the middle class: the reforms President Biden is urging to help balance the Administration’s $3.5 trillion budget bill.

    The changes won’t be going as far as the president first proposed. Congress writes the laws, and House Democrats have already dialed back on Biden’s wish list.  Even so, the bill will almost certainly reflect a sharp shift in America’s priorities.

    As Biden himself puts it, “My tax policy is based on a simple proposition, which is to stop rewarding wealth and start rewarding work a little bit.”

    Republicans oppose everything, and a few Democrats have differences as well. Here’s a quick rundown of some major items as legislators continue to shape the final bill.

    A cut in the top marginal rate was part of Trump’s 2017 tax giveaway. Biden wants the rate back where it was, at 39.6 percent. It would apply to taxable incomes above $400,000 for individuals and $450,000 for married couples.

    The tax break on capital gains is a huge part of America’s tax handout to the haves. The current levy on long-term capital gains tops out at 20 percent, little more than half the top rate on income from work. Biden hoped to equalize those rates, but that hope is history.

    The Democratic-controlled Ways and Means Committee opted instead for a hike in the capital gains tax to 25 percent. Significantly, the new rate would apply to any gains realized after September 13—preventing any stock sell-offs to avoid the 25 percent rate. The Committee also recommended a 3 percent surcharge on taxable incomes above $5 million.

    Ending the carried interest loophole is another of Biden’s tax-fairness goals. Candidate Trump promised to do it, but President Trump reneged and let it stand: “a tax dodge for wealthy private equity and hedge fund managers,” allowing them to defer taxes and ultimately treat their income as lower-taxed capital gains.

    Bills are advancing in both the House and the Senate to do what Trump turned his back on. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has drafted the most extensive repeal: it doesn’t even include the Biden recommendation for a $400,000 income exclusion.

    A supporter of the Wyden bill, former BlackRock managing director Morris Pearl, describes carried interest as an “absurd, regressive loophole with no credible economic justification…that has allowed some of the wealthiest people in the country to cut their tax bill nearly in half.”

    Wealthy corporations have also been big winners in the tax-cut sweepstakes: Trump reduced the rate on corporate earnings from 35 percent all the way down to 21 percent. Biden was pushing for an increase to 28 percent—still less than it was before Trump—but he won’t be getting it.

    The current Democratic plan calls for graduated corporate rates, moving from 18 percent for incomes below $400,000 to 26.5 percent on incomes above $5 million. The benefit of the lower rates would phase out for firms with incomes over $10 million.

    Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) wants an even lower top rate. Nothing can pass if Manchin doesn’t come aboard (and every other Democrat as well). In other words, the numbers are still in flux.

    Liberals are happy enough with what’s in the bill, but deeply unhappy about what isn’t. Listen to Inequality.org: “Without significant changes…billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos will hardly pay a nickel more in taxes. And families like the Waltons…will continue to amass huge dynastic fortunes.”

    All the same, America could be on the verge of a seismic change in tax policy.  After decades of tax laws that disproportionately favor the rich, Biden is shifting the focus to the broad middle class.

    Instead of putting millions more into the pockets of millionaires, he intends to put billions more into the social safety net—into childcare and healthcare and education.

    President Kennedy, 1961: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” President Biden to America’s wealthy, 2021: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what your taxes can do for your country.”

    Congress willing, Biden’s message could be delivered within weeks.

    • This article first appeared at New York Daily News

    The post Biden: Tilt Taxes to the Middle Class first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Right Wing “Never Forgot” 9/11 Because It Never Remembered It Correctly

    A pickup truck is parked just two blocks from Ground Zero on September 10, 2021 in New York City.

    When 19 al-Qaeda hijackers flew four commercial airliners — one crashed following an attempt by heroic passengers to regain control, one plowed into the Pentagon and two rammed New York’s Twin Towers — it seemed the world sat glued to a million different TV screens. After the first report, I ran home as crowds stared at the news in bars, restaurants and bodegas. Reflected off those screens, it looked to me like New York City was filled with hundreds of burning towers.

    The surreal moment had a truth. September 11 was instantly split by political ideology into many 9/11s. But the one that ended up defining the past 20 years was the right wing’s version. “Never forget” may be the slogan, but the right “never forgot” 9/11 because it never remembered it correctly. The national trauma of Ground Zero became a call to fight. Since they do not see people of color as citizens or even human, the “war on terror” transformed into a war on democracy.

    The Two 9/11s

    Here in New York, smoke rose from Ground Zero, carrying the ash of over two thousand people into the sky, and grieving families lit candles near photos of loved ones, buried under a mountain of debris. On the left, 9/11 was partly understood as the inevitable blowback of U.S. imperialism. On the right — and in many cases, in the center — it was portrayed as an attack on “Western civilization.”

    Coming back from volunteering at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center where I helped organize relief supplies, I saw a man talking to a large crowd. “You can’t bomb the whole world,” he pointed above their heads, “and not expect it to come back at you.” Three months later, Seven Stories Press published 9-11 by Noam Chomsky, explaining the al-Qaeda attack as blowback from U.S. foreign policy. Chomsky said, “In much of the world the U.S. is regarded as the leading terrorist state.” In the pages, he cited U.S. state terrorism against Nicaragua, its support of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that left 18,000 dead and the arms shipment to Turkey to slaughter Kurds. Chomsky explained 9/11 was caused by U.S. arming Islamic fundamentalists in the 1980s in order to create an “Afghan Trap” for the Soviet Union. When Osama bin Laden saw U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia, he sought to overthrow the client state to create a pure Islamic caliphate. In 2004, bin Laden released a video saying inspiration came from the U.S. backing Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. He said, “While I was looking at these destroyed towers in Lebanon, it sparked in my mind that the tyrant should be punished with the same and that we should destroy towers in America.”

    After the Twin Towers fell, the far right’s version of 9/11 crystallized; the enemy was not fundamentalists but people of color and non-Christians whose existence undermined the U.S. from within. The motif of the “internal enemy” deepened the further right one went. Some on the right blamed 9/11 on its victims, implying that many marginalized New Yorkers deserved to die.

    “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say, ‘you helped this happen,’” Rev. Jerry Falwell said on Pat Robertson’s show “The 700 Club” on September 13, 2001. Falwell saw terrified New Yorkers, covered in dust, through an ideological lens of Christian nationalism that made them into the “sinful” who caused this suffering.

    His vision differed only in degree from neo-Nazi reactions to 9/11, monitored by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracked respect for al-Qaeda. In one post, Rocky Suhayda of the American Nazi Party said, “It’s a DISGRACE that in a population of at least 150 MILLION ‘White/Aryan’ Americans … we provide so FEW that are willing to do the same” — essentially calling for neo-Nazis to commit similar acts of terrorism.

    For the settler-colonial complex, difference is danger, and enemies are everywhere. This type of thinking pervaded the right and center-right response to 9/11. It also led to Trump’s presidency. It led to the January 6 attempted coup at the Capitol. And it fuels the ongoing right-wing attempts to destroy democracy to save white supremacy.

    Circle the Wagons

    “Islam is peace,” President George W. Bush said. “These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent war and terror.” The speech took place at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., two weeks after al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people. The goal, according to the Bush administration, was to prevent vigilante violence against Muslim Americans and show what “compassionate conservativism” meant. On the ground, the FBI reported that in 2001, there were 481 hate crimes against Muslims, a wild spike compared to years before. Three people were killed. Many, many more were targeted, discriminated against in the workplace and in schools, and singled out for extra airport security. Racist violence not only targeted Muslims, but also racial and religious groups perceived to be Muslim.

    This violence made the red in the American flag look like blood. 9/11 did not cause new racism but released what existed under the surface. The United States is a settler-colonial nation in which European colonizers attempted to replace Indigenous people through genocide, and enslaved millions of Africans to create massive wealth. Murder cleared space to erect a permanent state and a racial vocabulary to justify the violence. Each generation inherited the mythology through popular culture. The common theme was that Anglo-Saxon America had to be safeguarded against threats.

    It’s in our language, like the phrase “circle the wagons” which comes from the seizing of Native land in the West by settlers who rode wagons and circled them when they faced resistance. It’s in Thomas Dixon’s 1902 book, The Leopard’s Spots, in which Black men are portrayed as animalistic brutes, and in the 2018 film, The Quiet Place, where dark snarling creatures hunt a white family. It’s in early American captivity narratives and Western film showing whelping, “bloodthirsty” Natives, a motif analyzed in Reel Injun. It’s in popular culture’s portrayal of Arabs as “savage” and Muslims as “terrorists” — from Aladdin to Iron Man. What one repeatedly sees in this mythology is the white American being portrayed as a victim of violence inflicted by people of color.

    The right-wing settler-colonial complex made 9/11 more than a tragedy — it was a trigger of paranoia. It hit a core and sensitive cultural trauma, defined by Ron Eyerman in his 2019 book Memory, Trauma, and Identity as “… a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric, affecting a people who achieved some degree of cohesion.” Later, he explained that that trauma has to be “explained” through “public reflection” for later generations. The “tear in the social fabric” for the right was white bodies supposedly torn apart by Native people fighting the theft of their land, when outnumbered duringthe U.S.’s foundation. Added to that was the terror of enslaved Africans rising up in Nat Turner’s rebellion and in scores of smaller slave revolts. The settler colonial myth of people of color being violent to whites made 9/11 an existential crisis for conservatives, who continue to ignore how many working-class people of color died in the Twin Towers, like those memorialized in Puerto Rican poet Martin Espada’s poem “In Praise of Local 100.”

    In the years that followed, history seemed to conspire to heighten that anxiety. President Obama was elected. During the campaign, fringe far right conspiracy theorists said he was not born in Hawaii but Kenya, and was a secret Muslim. Republican voters told then-candidate Sen. John McCain that Obama palled with domestic terrorists and one woman said he was “Arab.” Media personality and next president Donald Trump took “Birtherism” to new heights, demanding Obama present a birth certificate, stoking racial animus until finally relenting.

    In the eyes of a colonial-settler mindset, Obama was the terrifying sign that whites would be “vulnerable” again and people of color would elect socialists to seize their property. Election night 2008 saw gun sales go off the charts. Over Obama’s two terms, pollster Cornell Belcher’s book, Black Man in the White House, tracked the rise of “racial aversion.” He said, “It was a predictable backlash to the first time the vast majority of whites — their political will did not have an outcome that they wanted.”

    Fear and loathing bubbled under the surface, until again, Trump came in the 2015 presidential campaign and blasted it through the megaphone of his mouth. He warned of “rapist” Mexicans and Muslims as a “Trojan Horse,” and called for a travel ban on Muslims. He recycled 9/11 to stoke red state rage, saying, “There were people that were cheering, in the other side of New Jersey where you have large Arab populations, they were cheering as the World Trade Center came down.” It was a lie. It was believed anyway, though, because the right wing truly sees itself as a hapless victim of history.

    The right’s use of 9/11 reached beyond Trump to the semi-intellectual sphere with Michael Anton’s essay “The Flight 93 Election” (referencing the plane where passengers fought the hijackers) in Claremont Review of Books. He warned that if Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, Big Government would cannibalize civil society, open borders and flood the U.S. with hordes of “Third World foreigners” to lock in a permanent majority. (Unfortunately, Clinton’s agenda was in reality much more centrist.) Anton’s essay was a stylized take on the “white replacement” conspiracy found in the far right.

    Again, the colonial-settler complex. Again, the fear of being overtaken. Again, the panic that the Natives and foreigners are winning. It led to panic at the 2018 midterms, when the initial members of The Squad (Representatives Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) were told by a weakened Trump to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Trump came hard at Representative Omar, a Somali American and Muslim, with a video splicing footage of the burning Twin Towers with a speech she had given.

    And then Trump lost. Encouraged by the bitter ex-president and led to believe an election lost meant they lost America, known on the right as “white replacement” in which people of color outnumber whites and seize control. It is a nightmare fantasy that drove a ragtag coup was attempted on January 6, 2021. Officers were wounded. Wild-eyed right-wingers fought with police. For those who ransacked the Capitol and the many who supported them, it was the climactic battle of 9/11.

    Woke Empire

    Twenty years after September 11, President Joe Biden removed the last of the U.S. military from Afghanistan and the far right had an interesting reaction. The American far right praised the Taliban. On Telegram, an encrypted app used by neo-Nazis, cheers poured in for the Islamic fundamentalists as one post said, “If white men in the West had the same courage as the Taliban, we would not be ruled by Jews currently.” It is a similar sentiment to the one expressed by the far right when al-Qaeda first rammed planes in the towers and Rocky Suhayda said in response, “’White/Aryan’ Americans … we provide so FEW that are willing to do the same.” On the other side of the Atlantic, the European far right warned of an invasion of refugees from the collapse of the U.S. puppet government in Kabul.

    The far right praised terrorists while paramedics, firefighters, construction workers and military tunneled through a mountain of rubble to rescue desperate people on 9/11. They pulled survivors out. They breathed in toxic dust that destroyed lungs. Some died of cancer.

    They did that dangerous work in spirit of humanism. It is the same spirit that moved pilots and humanitarian workers to get fleeing Afghans onto planes as the Taliban closed in. It is the same spirit that drove the tireless work of activists over the past two decades. It is a vision that rejects the white-supremacy-structured foundation on which this country was built. The social movements that changed the face of the country ultimately make an appeal to our greater humanity, even if they begin with defending a specific racial group or gender or class. Racism still exists. The legacy of it is still seen today. But social movements are chipping away at that foundation, more and more each day.

    The far right hates what the U.S. is becoming. It is possessed by a settler-colonial vision to protect a purity that never existed. The rest of us, the vast majority, have to take the true lesson of 9/11, during the crises that will come — climate change, more attempted coups by Republicans, economic meltdowns — to do what the first responders did and keep risking ourselves to make sure everyone gets out alive.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • AOC Pans Greg Abbott’s Pledge to End Rape in Texas: “GOP Laws HELP Abusers”

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has panned Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for his disingenuous claims about preventing sexual assault made while defending the state’s dangerous abortion ban this week.

    As Texas’s abortion ban has faced fierce criticism from a multitude of angles over the past weeks, Abbott has doubled down on a dubious defense: he will supposedly work to end sexual assault in the state by “eliminat[ing] all rapists,” incarcerating them instead.

    Aside from the obvious paradox of this statement — how could the government punish an assailant before they assault someone? — critics have pointed out that the sentiment isn’t actually genuine. Abbott doesn’t want to end sexual assault, critics say, and if he did, he would take actual steps to address rape culture.

    “If Gov. Abbott is as ‘anti-rape’ as he claims, why doesn’t he just lead the Texas state legislature to pass a law for $10k bounties on people who engage in or aid sexual assault?” wrote Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter — a likely dig at the “bounty hunter” aspect of the new anti-abortion law the governor just signed. “Or is he opposed to that because it’s a slippery slope of vigilantism where men could be unjustly targeted?”

    The so-called “bounty hunter” system that allows any private citizen to sue anyone who aids a person in getting an abortion and win a reward of $10,000 or more is exceptionally cruel, as critics have pointed out. It not only creates a massive chilling effect on abortion providers in the state, but also encourages harassment and sets a dangerous precedent of vigilantism, as Ocasio-Cortez pointed out.

    Bounty hunting as a practice has a grim, dark history in the U.S., having been used to abduct Black people into slavery and, in modern times, used to terrorize people who cannot afford to pay off bail bonds. Companies that bounty hunt make millions while causing untold suffering to their targets and their families.

    As critics of the abortion ban have pointed out, Texas’s abortion ban will likely disproportionately affect non-white, LGBTQ and poor people, who may lack the resources to travel out of state to obtain an abortion. The disproportionate effect of the law hearkens back, then, to bounty hunting’s racist and discriminatory roots.

    Such a system for enforcing any law only enhances the carceral state. Though the Texas law doesn’t directly incriminate abortion providers or people who aid someone seeking an abortion, it creates punitive measures for these individuals. It adds to, rather than eliminates, rape culture, which is one of the reasons a person may seek an abortion in the first place.

    Abortions should not be subject to punitive measures to begin with, and the negative stigma around what is clearly a medical procedure created by anti-choice groups is part of what has led the U.S. down this sordid path. The Texas abortion ban is extremely restrictive, not allowing even victims of rape or incest to be exempted from the law, which makes it particularly inhumane. Not that there should be any shame — or for that matter, a prohibitive law — associated with seeking an abortion for any reason in the first place, abortion rights activists point out.

    “Still thinking about how Gov. Abbott’s message to survivors terrified of the bounties now on their heads is ‘I will end rape.’ No, he won’t. He and the GOP just gave abusers & coercive partners a powerful new tool to intimidate victims,” wrote Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday. “These GOP laws HELP abusers, not stop them.”

    “By allowing any person to financially destroy pregnant people on a whim, they knowingly handed over the keys of manipulation & control to people most likely to use it,” she continued. “Don’t let them feign ignorance about this. They know exactly what they’re doing. This is about fear & control.”

    The New York lawmaker also wrote that the real reason Republicans are seeking to outlaw abortion is their desire to take away people’s body autonomy.

    “Sexual assault is an abuse of power that attempts to seize sexual control over another person’s body,” wrote Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter. “Anti-choice laws are also an abuse of power that attempts to seize sexual control over people’s bodies en masse. And that’s one way rape culture informs anti-choice legislation.”

    “It’s not a coincidence that Texas is where GOP are testing new ways to retake sexual control via legislation,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “Texas had ‘anti-sodomy’ laws in place until 2003 (!) that made non-PIV sex illegal until the Supreme Court overturned it on the basis of Roe v. Wade’s right to privacy.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Greg Abbott’s Approval Rating Hits All-Time Low as COVID Rages Across Texas

    Texas Governor Greg Abbott speaks during a press conference on June 8, 2021 in Austin, Texas.

    Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s approval rating has dropped over the past months as he has led Republicans in the state to pursue and pass a number of restrictive and discriminatory laws over the summer.

    Polling done just before the abortion ban in the state took effect by the Texas Politics Project, run by the University of Texas at Austin, finds that Abbott’s approval rating went from a net even 44 percent approval and disaspproval in June, to a net negative in the group’s most recent poll. Now, 41 percent of people polled approve of the GOP governor’s job performance, while 50 percent disapprove.

    Abbot’s approval rating dropped with people across the partisan spectrum: from 8 percent to 6 percent among Democrats, 77 percent to 73 percent among Republicans and 41 percent to 30 percent among independents. According to the Texas Politics Project, Abbott’s approval rating is now the lowest it has been since he took office in 2015.

    Overall, the poll found that a majority of those polled think that Texas is going in the wrong direction. While only 35 percent of those polled believe the state is going in the right direction, 52 percent believe it’s on the wrong track.

    Part of the reason for Abbott’s declining approval rating and the pessimism over the state’s direction may be due to the pandemic, said the executive director of the Texas Politics Project. “This is really an eye-opener for us,” Jim Henson told KXAN.

    The poll found that Texans generally disapprove of Abbott’s handling of the pandemic, with his approval ratings on the issue reaching the lowest levels since the beginning of the pandemic in April 2020. Only 39 percent of those polled approved of how Abbott has handled the COVID pandemic in his state, while 53 percent disapproved.

    Over the past months, the Delta variant of COVID-19 has surged across Texas. Case rates in Texas and across the country appear to be flattening, but the state has some of the highest rates for infections and deaths. Texas also has a relatively low vaccination rate, with only 48 percent of adults fully vaccinated to date.

    Part of the reason for the high case counts, especially in recent weeks, is Abbott’s insistence in not taking the necessary measures to stop the spread of the virus. In fact, he has moved against the recommendations of public health experts and ordered a ban on mask mandates from government entities, which has almost certainly contributed to a surge in cases among children as schools have returned to in-person classes.

    The mask mandate ban is also unpopular, according to the Texas Politics Project poll. Forty-one percent of those polled support it, while 45 percent are opposed.

    Though the poll was conducted before the state’s abortion ban went into effect, Texas Republicans have been working for months to suppress voters and implement other radical right-wing measures across the state.

    Republicans’ recent voter suppression bill, for instance, makes it harder for Black and brown people and people with disabilities to vote. The GOP has also been working on a number of bigoted anti-trans laws aimed at making it harder for transgender children and adults to survive in the state.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.